Hurl a SLurl!
Here's sneak peak at something we recently cooked up here at the Lab. Kudos go out to our whole web dev team, especially Sky, Mark, Benny and Peter.
As you all know, one of our key goals in the year ahead is to lower the barrier between Second Life and the Net. Sites like Snapzilla and SL Boutique show the potential for sending images from Second Life to the web and for using the web to buy Second Life items and have them delivered in-world.
SLurl solves a big problem we've had -- how can I tell someone where I am in Second Life so that they can find me in an easy and contextualized way, just by clicking? In the past, I'd create a location that looked like this secondlife://simname/x/y/z . This worked just fine provided you had Second Life installed, but it made completely failed for people without Second Life. Hence one could only "preach to the converted". Not any more.
Here's how it works:
Just enter your address in Second Life like this
http://slurl.com/secondlife(simulator name)/x/y/z
They'll see a result that looks like this or this. See the location, all the info about it, and just click and it launches Second Life and teleports you straight there. And if you don't have SL, download it and you're off to the races. Oh, and you can modify the appearance of your Slurl page endlessly.
The commercial possibilities that this opens seem pretty interesting -- suddenly there's an easy way to build something in Second Life and bring web-based communities in quickly and easily.
What do you guys think?
Please create some of these and share them -- I'd love to see how you use it. Also, please tell us if you think it needs work. In fact, you can come tell me in person at my office in Second Life.
