slurlmarker

I built a web bookmarking HUD for Second Life over the long weekend, but to introduce it I should say some things about Landmarker.

At this point it's obvious that Landmarker never caught on. There are three good reasons to name out of hand:

Landmarker screenshot

  1. No advertising push. I didn't lift a finger to tell people about it or explain why it was awesome, as it was just a cool idea of Cienna Rand's that I tossed together as a mod_perl app with a few web service glue toys.
  2. The concepts and design are easy for a web hipster audience, not the general Second Life audience. It's more at home with Flickr and other Web 2.0 services than the dominant example of a hit third-party service for Second Life residents, Snapzilla. The folks at Linden Lab who thought it was great obviously got it, but they're in that demographic. (That was also before the Webmap API and slurl, so I guess that's what they found cool, as that's what they implemented.)
  3. No in-world interface. While Cienna (and I) hacked up a pretty good HUD prototype (as soon as HUDs arrived in SL--I had built Landmarker before then), I never published it. Without the HUD, the site is a pain to use.

The people who understand the value of web landmark bookmarking are the people who, as in #2, probably already find value in general web bookmarking. These people would be (roughly) just as happy with an in-game tool to post to an existing bookmarking site--and I would be happy too, because then I could give Landmarker a proper burial.

So here's slurlmarker.

secondlifepostcard_61.jpg

slurlmarker is just the HUD component from #3 above. Instead of building URLs to Landmarker, it builds slurl links and posts them to del.icio.us. It prefills the title and a few tags, like slurlmarker, so you can see all the "slurlmarked" links here. It also adds special secondlife:region: tags, the page for which the "View Places Nearby" button loads up.

Lyre Calliope showed some interest in Landmarker, so I dropped a version of slurlmarker off to her. After some suggestions, she passed a copy to some friends at the Electric Sheep Company, including Satchmo Prototype with whom I spoke briefly and who wrote a nice blog post about slurlmarker.

You can get your own copy from the vendor pictured above at Taco (213, 217). The slurlmarker HUD is full perms and open source. Here are a few starting ideas if you want to hack with it:

  • Fix the clunky way the HUD learns your del.icio.us username. (The first time you try to use it, it asks you to say your username on a randomly selected channel. It remembers it until the script is reset.)
  • Reproduce Landmarker by mapping the feed of slurlmarked locations.
  • Use the new llHTTPRequest LSL function to view or map the feed of nearby locations in-world.

Hope you find this fun and/or useful.

0 comments