SLorpedo Tweets
March 8, 2008 by jt
If plants can twitter, bridges can twitter and houses can twitter, why not mixed reality games? To find out, I’ve created a SLorpedo twitter account to experiment. To make it simple to find any SLorpedo games in world I’m planning to tweet locations using TinySL. Twitter also seems like a really nice way to get the score back out of Second Life; at the moment the score is only shown inside Second Life, but I quite like the idea of using a virtual world to work out the score for a real life game without ever logging in!
I also think that twitter might be an interesting way to keep track of object keys and channel keys inside Second Life, without needing my own server. So instead of copying a channel key from the Second Life client, the SLorpedo program could find out the key from Twitter… maybe.
To spiral further into mixed reality confusion, I’m also trying to display the SLorpedo Twitter feed back inside Second Life using QTtext. QTtext is a really simple way to display text on a prim using a plain text file and a media texture (even simpler than HTML on a prim which is on its way at last) and I’m hopeful that a bit of XSLT on a Twitter RSS feed will do the trick nicely.
Going pretty well I think. More recent tweets from SLorpedo are real, rather than me cheating to test what might be good to twitter!
[...] Having recently had a couple of twitter related tweetups in Hursley I was having a look at hashtags and decided to give tracking a go as well. The first thing I decided to track turned out to be so unpopular that I didn’t think it was working at all! So I switched to something that might feature in a few more tweets… too many as it turned out! I was about ready to give up on tracking when I learned that SLorpedo was going to make a reappearance at BarCampBrighton2, so I gave tracking on more shot. This time it worked perfectly- I’ve been clearing out the house and off doing viewings all day so didn’t have time to keep an eye on Arcanum for signs of life but just before dinner the phone buzzed as Rachel then Nigel tweeted about SLorpedo and I just about caught the end of the game in Second Life when I logged in! Very cool! (Watch out for SLorpedo tweeting as well!) [...]