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November 30, 2006
Posted by Dave Evans
SL Profiles enhanced profiles displayed within SecondLife's client. The profiles are pulled from SLprofiles.com. The site accepts advertising, which is paid in Linden Dollars (in-world currency.) Profiles can have first life and Secondlife pics, places blogs, ratings and more. Very cool to be able to bring web content into the SL client. Word on the street is that various third party clients will be available soon. Snow Crash here we come.
Technorati Tags: secondlife
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November 6, 2006
Posted by Dave Evans
Someone sent me this link to a Web 2.0 event where FriendFinder CEO Andrew Conru does a presentation titled "what can we learn from the adult industry." I'm posting this because some people argued that I called Friend Finder network "adult", when it contains a variety of religious and other non-adult sites. AFF is stickier than Disney, in the same league as Google in terms of minutes spent on site. More time is spent on AFF than any other adult site on the web.
Here is some tasty research about online daters.
Young people are becoming technically socialized on social network services (SNS), and SNS serve valuable social needs. However, just as a bar would fail if it tried to be all things to all people, SNS sites must realize their value is dictated by their context. As such, they must consistently be thinking about new ways to bring audience in to this context, rather than just adding new additions designed to trap clientele that wishes to move on. That we wish to move from place to place is entirely natural, and generally technologists fail rather miserably when they try to break human nature for economic reasons.
Via Fred Stutzman, aka Chimprawk, aka Unit Structures. Fred is the go-to guy if you want thorough yet readable academic look at social networking.
More avatars from Zwinky.
Technorati Tags: avatars, socialnetworking
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October 25, 2006
Posted by Dave Evans
Northwestern University has developed an automated news-video program, News At Seven, with help from the National Science Foundation.
News At Seven is a system that automatically generates a virtual news show. Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes news stories and then passes the formatted content to an artificial anchor for presentation. Using the resources present on the web, the system goes beyond the straight text of the news stories to also retrieve relevant images and blogs with commentary on the topics to be presented.
Once it has assembled and edited its material, News At Seven presents it to the audience using a graphical game engine and text-to-speech (TTS) technology in a manner similar to the nightly news watched regularly by millions of Americans. The result is a cohesive, compelling performance that successfully combines techniques of modern news programming with features made by possible only by the fact that the system is, at its core, completely virtual.
This is absolutely amazing. It's even cooler when you realize all that's going on behind the scenes to pull everything together. Watch the Celebrity news clip, it's pulling web news and blog commentary together, seamlessly.
This is a first attempt, for this group anyway, at automated newscasting, and it's only going to get better.
Imagine if dating sites went past canned photos of "sexy new singles", instead posting short, customized videoblogs every day which culled together information from across the system to present members with avatar-based video of notable new people worth checking out (and why you should pay attention to them based on how you match up.)
Avatars are cool. Avatars that reach into databases, find out what's new and notable and personalize the news via automated delivery are mind-blowing.
I want one!
Via Boingboing.
Technorati Tags: news+at+seven
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October 18, 2006
Posted by Dave Evans
 Dating site avatars which help singles search, browse and communicate with each other continue to gain popularity, if only during planning sessions for the next generation of dating sites coming out in Q1 2007. Eharmony and Match have their DVD and video series, which is fine for some people. The rest of us need to be told what to do by a snarky avatar like the one at Msdewey.com. The experience interacting with a Flash-based avatar is initially appealing, but the site is more like a proof of concept search engine, it's got nothing on Google when it comes to quick hits.
As much as I like Oddcast, it's too cartoony and other avatar solutions are either too expensive or complicated. Flash video like this will become de rigeur as broadband penetration continues.
I've looked at the profile and relationship help at Yahoo and other sites, which are often designed by designers who are not single, force you to change context from the profile page to some other Flash-based area of the site and don't provide more than the absolute basics, let alone advanced hints and tips on taking advantage of all the services the site has to offer.
Where are the dating site helper apps?
Technorati Tags: helper+app, msdewey, dating+guide
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October 9, 2006
Posted by Dave Evans
I went to buy some new clothes for my SecondLife avatar today after doing some real life shopping in NYC over the weekend. It turns out:
A "griefer" -- person who disrupts video-games -- is attacking the online world Second Life with self-replicating "grey goo" that is melting down the Second Life servers. "Grey goo" is shorthand for an apocalyptic nano-gone-wrong scenario wherein nanoassemblers replicate so profligately that they reduce the world to slurry.
Nuke tests in North Korea and now digital nanotechnology is crippling the metaverse. What's next?
Via BoingBoing.
Technorati Tags: grey+goo, avatars
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October 4, 2006
Posted by Dave Evans
 I tweaked my Yahoo avatar. The squirrel is in the picture because one jumped through my window last week and I woke up with it staring right at me from my nightstand. This type of thing does not happen to normal people.
Technorati Tags: yahoo+avatars
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