December 19, 2005

Second Life Events now in Eventful

At the Web 2.0 conference I ran into an old RealNetworks colleague from years earlier, Philip Rosedale, who these days helms Linden Lab, makers of the Second Life (hereinafter SL) online role-playing game / alternate world.

I told him what I was up to with EVDB, and mentioned how intrigued I was to learn that there were events going on in SL. I'd found out about this because of Cory Doctorow's "personal appearance" in SL and then a little later, author Thomas P. Barnett's event in SL.

Phil told me there were something like four hundred daily events all over Second Life, and sure, he'd love for us to index them! So, we made arrangements to do so and presto, Second Life events are now flowing into the EVDB platform and the Eventful.com website.

Here's a handy link to see what's going on in Second Life at the moment. So far we've indexed over 1600 events in December alone! There's all kinds of things going on in that other world...

One thing to note on the event detail pages for Second Life events. You'll notice that one of the links says "Second Life link:". This is the link with a special url, beginning with "secondlife://", which if you've installed Second Life on your Mac or PC, should tell your browser to launch SL and "teleport" straight to that "venue" -- the location within the SL world. Very handy!

That's great! The in-world event list needs an overhaul. I felt better tags and better search options are sorely needed. So much, that I was toying with the idea of making my own event portal. But I don't know Philip directly, I can't get a direct feed of events from LindenLab... and I don't want to waste my time re-learning all the lessons that you probably learned making this service.

Now, for God's sake, press on Mr. Rosendale (aka Philip Linden) so LindenLab adapt your service for the in-world event list too. In-world HTML is coming to SecondLife this quarter. We need better event list, we need better searching and a folksonomy-based tool. We need your service!

I don't mean to rain on your parrade but there might be some conflicts with SL's event posting rules and Eventful's.

To make the best of tags is very important .