search

Jeska Linden, the community manager at Linden Lab, the company that publishes Second Life said in a discussion (link to recording removed as per InformationWeeks wishes) today at an InformationWeek meeting, that the development team were playing around with Google Search Appliance. Google's enteprise hardware/software search solution would allow residents to search the Metaverse far more effectively. In theory, it would knock home grown efforts like the upcoming revamp of Sheep Search, Meta Mart and SL Browser right out of the game.

The upside would be a vastly improved Search experience. So let's hope it works out...

Jeska said that the results from searches using the new system would be rendered in flat HTML, which would also be usability improvement and perhaps one step closer to the fabled "html on a prim" ideal of bringing markup inworld.

One of the issues facing Second Life, the 3D streaming poster child of user created virtual worlds, is the paradoxical problem of too much content. Residents can literally create what they wish, with little or no restraint, which is fantastic, but the speed at which content is generated (buildings, regions, hair, clothes, anything...) is disproportionate, to the young worlds concurrent population. What this means, is that many new residents' first experience is of the vast emptiness of unpopulated regions, corporate ghost towns and the poor quality crap that most of us manage to create. They then file the experience under "been there, done that", and never return.

This week, like one of the commenters on a Terra Nova post entitled The Dark Side of User-Created Content, I had an "aha! moment", as several things I felt I knew intuitively, but had not fully clicked, fell into place.

Social Search as a means of discovery on the 2D web has risen in recent years, and today, sites like Digg and Del.icio.us dominate the way many web savvy people discover new content. There are literally scores of Social Search sites, and in every niche you can find some variation on the social news, or social bookmarking theme. These work well. They're not perfect though. They suffer from spamming, as well as quality issues, and often it takes some time to sift through the crap to find the best content. But they do work, and have become a staple tool of online media consumption.

Jim Purbrik, a Linden Lab employee who's Second Life persona is Babbage Linden, admits that the inworld Search system isn't doing a great job: "As long as it's always as easy to find the good stuff, people will cluster there and ignore the vast swathes of sketched experiences. Unfortunately search in SL isn't doing a great job of keeping up with the fire hose of content at the moment.". Third party recommendation engines such as Gridmarker and Sloog are already addressing this problem however, and as they gain users, their value as discovery tools for the virtual world increase.

Recommendation isn't enough though. People can tell you what's hot, or not, but if it's empty when you get there, it's still shit. Right?

What's needed, is the added dimension of presence. Jerry Paffendorf, resident futurist at the Electric Sheep Company provided my aha! here by helping me realize why Twitter.com (see my Twitter page here) is so popular amongst Second Life'rs:

Some of the solutions that I see emerging for open virtual world search, built on top of more traditional search engines and tagging and bookmarking schemes because you still need that information out there, are emerging on the web with realtime "what are you doing right now?" search and exposure engines like Twitter and Me.dium.

A New Kind of Search Service

So imagine this It doesn't exist yet, but it will, and soon.

• Social bookmarking and commenting of landmarks.
• Tagging of bookmarks and Flickr like collections and groups
• Passive social networking based on groups, similar tags etc
• Realtime presence indicators - Who's tagging what, right now
• Voting, Digg style -- Crowd sourcing.
• Important bit: Integrated into the viewer. Though this will work with a HUD, it would be so much more effective if the whole system were built into the default software.

Sounds like a web 2.0 wank fest to me, but it might just be the outline of a true killer Search app for Second Life, and as Jerry and Babbage hinted at, a solution to the ghost town syndrome of a rapidly expanding Metaverse.

Thoughts?

Gridmarker. a slick, addictive new search service for Second Life aims to not only solve the existing problem of Search and social discovery in the Metaverse, but to provide developers with a backbone API for use in their own objects inworld as well as an open source HUD to demonstrate the API's capabilities.

When Sebastian Pedro, who in real life is a research assistant in the brain imaging lab at Columbia University, first told me about Gridmarker, my initial reaction was "Why do we need another social bookmarking app when we already have Sloog?" The answer it seems is simple: Gridmarker is a more comprehensive service. It offers better customization in the form of titles, comments and tags per bookmark and as a result, at least according to Sebastian, is "better prepared for long term growth.". Part of the long term plan is to provide an Amazon-style recommendation engine, "people who visited this spot also visited..." as well as other applications built on the data collected in the folksonomy of user gridmarks.

It's all about the RSS...

Right now though, Gridmarker already has a stack of great features. There are all kinds of feeds to choose from: all gridmarks, gridmarks from a specific user, gridmarks from your watchlist, gridmarks featuring a specific tag, gridmarks from a specific user featuring a specific tag, the list goes on... here are a couple of uses I can think of right off the top of my head for these highly specific feeds:

• Layout a path through a region, or series of regions. Like a guided tour, complete with notes (the comments). You could fairly easily build an object inworld to follow this trail, and indeed I was talking to another developer today about just such an app.
• Drop gridmarks tagged as "metaversed" if you want me to take a look at something (build, service, business etc..). Im subscribed to the feed, and I'd be thrilled to find something in my reader put there for me :)

Watchlists are also potentially very powerful. Like some of the RSS feeds, they do rely on Gridmarker becoming a LOT more popular, but they could be killer. Like del.icio.us (and the backend of Gridmarker is actually built on an open source version of Delicious called Scuttle), you can add users to a collective watchlist, and then subscribe to the feed, giving you a stream of gridmarks from people you find interesting.

Another neat feature is resolution control. Gridmarker, like Sloog, attempts to measure the popularity of an area by counting the amount of times it's been tagged. The difference here is that Gridmarker allows users to increase the range of the search in meters, so you can see other gridmarks in either a very localized space, or a much wider area.

So how will Gridmarker make money? For now Sebastian tells me he's not exactly sure what solution he'll settle on, as increased usage will mean increased costs and the project will have to make money eventually. He did state that any monetary plans in the future would not include any variation on the theme of premium or paid memberships as this would discourage the most import component of the model, the influx of data.

Gridmarker is one of the better apps I've seen recently. It's fairly polished, and has serious potential. In fact, I'd tip it as a major contender in the race to provide better Search within Second Life -- whether it can gain enough traction with users however, remains to be seen.

If you want to follow my Gridmarked hops around the Metaverse, see here on my Gridmarks page, and if you'd like to drop something in my virtual inbox, just tag it as "metaversed", i'd love to see where you think I should be visiting!

Guus Van en Brekel has released this rather natty Firefox toolbar that includes ways to search tons of blogs, wiki's, exchange engines, feeds, podcasts, videos and images -- A kind of swiss army knife for searching the web for SL info. It's pretty good, but doesn't include Metaversed, so is fatally flawed, clearly...

You can download it here. If you use Firefox and have need to search for SL related info on the web it's a pretty neat bit of kit!