Intelligent Office Space

I’ve been pretty quiet lately on this blog… lot of things changing with my personal life. But I ran across a touching Father’s Day story that Peter Rojas of Engadget posted about his recently departed dad. I know that most people have a warm place in their heart for their father, but Peter provides such a wonderful portrait of his father that I just had to share it…

http://www.engadget.com/2007/06/17/the-father-of-the-father-of-engadget/

I have been increasingly thinking that Virtual Worlds applications can be viewed as incredibly rich, interactive and social interfaces, connecting people and data. This is especially true of course with environments like Second Life due to it’s nature as a user-created, and user-scripted world. And of course those scripts can link to the outside world to a degree by means of email, HTTP and XML-RPC. The idea that the Web is what it’s about, and that a virtual environment is a means for interfacing the Web is a concept that Trevor F. Smith has taken and run with in the open-source Ogoglio project.

I’ve been focusing on building communication links between SL and the Web. To me, having tools and systems that will help move data in and out of the Second Life environment is key to making SL useful for business. But lately, everything seems to have gone awry. This seems to particularly be the case since the new IM-email messaging object IDs went into place. Am I the only one whose messaging scripts have been breaking the past few weeks? I have a few scripts where I receive a notification via either email (llEmail) or offline IMs (llInstantMessage) from an object - both seem to be occasionally failing. I’d be interested to hear if any SL scripters are seeing similar issues.