Thursday, February 21, 2008

Meta-LIFE!

It's rare that I have an actual topic to discuss in here, but today I had the extreme pleasure of being given a very cool topic. :)

Robbie Kiama of meta-LIFE contacted me in world to ask if I'd like to give the metaHUD a try, and he was even nice enough to give me a demo of the whole thing!

Meta-LIFE is an up and coming social networking platform in Second Life. Think Facebook-Twitter-MySpace-SLExchange-your local entertainment newspaper all rolled up into one very nifty HUD.

MetaHUD-Timeline

This thing is really amazing. You can add friends, rate and comment on your friends, tag and rate different places [great if you have a club or land where you want people to go to!], travel, and even shop!

What's really cool about the friends thing is that you can keep up with what your friends are doing. The timeline is kind of like Facebook or Twitter. Not only can you see where they've gone, you can actually use the HUD to tp to that location too! So like if you have the HUD and you see that I've gone to Pillow Talk, and you want to go to Pillow Talk, you just click on it and go. How cool is that?

MetaHUD-Travel


If you use the Public Timeline, you can see where others who use meta-LIFE have gone and what they've done. It is SO neat! When you get to a location, you can tag it yourself and rate it, or just rate it. And it's not limited to just a thumbs up. Oh no, you can rate a really terrible place with a thumbs down. You can also add a location to your Favorites, and then you don't need to keep landmarks in your inventory, unless you just like landmarks. :)

And yes, you can SHOP! Right through the HUD! I gave it a try with a free item [the Free category was the first I hit up!] and I have to say, it was delivered more quickly than when I use SLExchange. If I were a shop owner [and I guess I will be one soon], I'd definitely get my items listed with this program. Designers, c'mon!! Do it! :)

I've been having a ton of fun with my HUD this evening, popping around places and tagging and rating. If you've like to give it a go, just IM me in-world and I'll pass you a HUD to wear. Or I believe you can go to the website and see where a terminal is and get one from there. Big thanks to Robbie for showing me this and being patient while my blonde brain tried to figure things out. :)

4 comments:

Robertas Vis said...

Thank you Alicia,

couldn't have said it better than you :)

for the rest of you - hope you will enjoy having fun using the your HUD, we have worked for almost a year now - to get to this level of maturity...

and again Thanks for these great words :)

Sidonie said...

Oooh! I want one! That looks very handy and fun too!

Jeff said...

That HUD does look very nice. Looks like they did a good job with it.

However, I will be very curious to see how long the average user who tries it will end up using this HUD - seems a bit involved to me. Reminds me of back in the day when the SLICR HUD got passed around and if I recall, that was mostly just about rating places, and I think I lasted two days before I got tired of trying to remember to tag everywhere I went and whether it would actually work in no script areas, etc. (Damn me and my ADD!)

I do recall a shopping HUD that Vint really liked, for a while, anyway, though I haven't heard much about it since...

And considering 99% of my friends do not give me mapping rights as it is right now, are they really going to want everyone to know their every move in SL? I mean, I'm all about voyeurism, but just reading over that timeline kinda made me feel a bit too stalkerish, lol.

Alicia Chenaux said...

Robbie - Thank YOU for showing me this!

Sid - I'll pass you a HUD when I get in world later. :)

Wrath - It's involved, but also very user friendly [in my opinion]. From what I've seen so far, the HUD does work in no script areas, but I'd have to go and really check that out. Also, the user has privacy settings that they can set up through the meta-LIFE website. I have it set so only people that I've friended can see my timeline. My main concern was that it was going to be a distraction on my screen, but it's pretty unobtrusive. I guess we'll see how I like it in a few days. :)