In what I hope will be the first of a long running and useful series of profiles of companies and tools that help businesses in Second Life, I spent a pleasant half hour of so talking to Alidar Moxie, a real world web developer who's producing some very cool tools for Second Life.
Alidar, who's company is called Mechanized Life and builds web apps for NASA subcontractors demonstrated three applications that I think would be great for many companies in Second Life. The first, was Calendar Cogs, which uses the Google Calendar API to dynamically list up to two weeks of events at a time and comes complete with "kiosk" and HUD.
Calendar Cogs allows you to display a list of events you have in a Google Calendar, but it also allows you to update those events via the HUD, and even subscribe to other events that are using the Calendar Cogs system. When touched, the kiosk "chats" a list of upcoming events to you, and if wearing the HUD, you'll be given an option to subscribe to any one or more of those events. I can see this working really well businesses that hold regular inworld events, and indeed serveral clubs already use the sytem and the American Library Association have also been looking at it.
One thing I've been looking for, and even experimenting a little with myself is a good way to display RSS in Second Life. Mechanized Life's RSS QT Screens may be just that. Text rendering can be a tricky business in SL, so Alidar has used SMIL to render the titles of RSS feeds in Quicktime. Im not sure it's a perfect solution, but it's not a bad one for sure. The screens look attractive, are fully customizable in terms of look and feel and could be used for all manner of notices and updates controlled by a blog or similarly RSS enabled application.
Lastly, we looked at the RSS Sensor, which is an ingenious little device that sits invisibly on your land and monitors visitor activity. It takes that activity, filters it through your customizations to the tool and outputs an RSS feed that you can use to track traffic. The thing that excites me about this is the prospect of pulling its feed into something like Jaiku and getting realtime alerts when people come to call :) I think I've just found myself a project for show and tell at the next Twitter Users meeting hhh!
Mechanized Life joins a growing list of gadget and tool shops in Second Life amongst my collected landmarks. If you want to visit them, and see these neat tools for yourself, use this teleport link. If you want to suggest other places, companies or tools that you'd like to see covered in this series, please email 57@metaversed.com
