Now, before you all start shouting at me, lemme 'splain what I mean. Two of the hallmarks of the Web 2.0 experience are Interconnectivity and Transparency. Interconnectivity in the sense that it's becoming increasingly possible to share information between online applications -- store photos on Flickr, share them with Tumblr, link to them with Pownce, etc.

Transparency is the ability to see, at a glance, what a connected user's life contains. You can see what music they listen to, read their opinions, know who they call friends. Think of the networking involved in MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Now, try to imagine SL with these concepts in place. I'd like to see which residents you and I have in common. I want to see your Snapzilla photos in a window in your profile. I'd love to stream my iTunes music directly into my avatar, not my land, for others to hear by simply subscribing to my stream. I need to be able to IM my friends from without SL. If people are going to keep touting SL as the 3D Internet, and LL isn't going to disabuse them of that notion, then these things need to be done. What will it take? What coding is required? Someone tell me I'm smoking hash just by thinking this is possible!

From the education communities we have two mashups for joining Facebook and Second Life. Alja reviews them both in detail on her blog.

Although I'm not a power user of Facebook by any stretch of the imagination, I do use it, so I will be exploring them in a bit more depth over the coming weeks. Both seem pretty simple and straight-forward to set up as well.

Pick up Second Friends on EduIsland or Second Life Link on English Village.

The 2007 European Machinima Festival announced it's nominees today. While they're not on the site yet, you can find them on their Facebook page, and Machinima Premiere. Second Life saw a large number of submissions, with a total of *7* films being nominated.

The videos represent a diverse crowd in Second Life. Some of the films are older, such as Better Life and Machinima Island, while others have been created within the last two months. Even the Teen Gridders got in on the action, with Global Kids' A Child's War. The other nominees are: Comcast Island, The Grid Review, Dreamed Up, and When the Postman Spits Twice.

[Thanks, Hugh, of Machinima for Dummies!]

For a list of the categories they were nominated under, please read on:

I'm excited to read Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human by Tom Boellstorff, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine, perhaps better known as his SL avatar Tom Bukowski.

One mode of thought has it that humans stopped evolving once they began to manipulate their environment to make their lives easier; there's nothing like the threat of extinction to force evolution. However, while our physical evolution might have slowed or even halted, our social evolution continues, as witness the rise of the online social networking phenomenon exemplified by MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and of course SL.

If I hadn't been such a poor student, I'd have gone into anthropology myself, so I'm eager to read Mr. Boellstorff's upcoming book, in which he relates his experiences being in-world for over two and a half years.

(Via chronicle.com)

You know what? I don't need a social networking tool. Actually, I don't think I even want one. Communications tools, now that's different. I'm using twitter and pownce (hey, Akela, aren't you supposed to pownce on things that twitter?), and about the only thing that would improve them for me (aside from them actually being, you know, reliable) is to hide away the lists of who is connected to who. That's information that I personally find to be both unnecessary and often actively misleading - your mileage may vary. I don't like misleading, personally.

I can't say as I've looked at a myspace page more than six times. I've never even seen facebook. I'm on LinkedIn, but is it actually useful to me? Not yet, no. Mostly they feel like a sort of webified way of wearing gang-colors. To associate yourself with brands, whether those are ideas, interests, hobbies or people. There are assorted third-party sites that add social-networking tools to Second Life, too. I can't say as they interest me either.

My friends list in Second Life, and my (kind of inadequate) groups list are tools that allow me to act or to communicate more effectively with than without. That's why I've got a blog, not a homepage. Social networking tools don't appear to afford me the benefits that I'm looking for, in exchange for the time spent.

Does the whole social-networks scene leave you a bit cold, or is there some sort of warm and fuzzy thing that I'm just plain missing here?

Profil3 is a new service that allows MMO players to display their achievements, set up their guilds, and meet other players -- creator Bogdan calls it 'Facebook for MMO's'.

It's got a nice, clean interface, which is something I appreciate more and more in this age of Web 2.0 flashiness. It's easy to modify your profil3 with your pictures and videos, and you get to host your own blogposts. Bogdan has done an admirable job with this site, and I'd like to see it grow. I realize that SL doesn't have guilds in the traditional, MMO sense of the term, but I've just started my own: Chew Toys. If anyone would like to be my guildie, join Profil3 and drop me a line!

(Thanks, Bogdan!)