As part of my team's project I was looking for ways to connect Second Life with Amazon's Web Services. The integration would allow an avatar to grab any book available on Amazon's website and browse through it in SL. The Amazon's API provides a wealth of functionalities from book covers to customer reviews, ratings, and prices. Unfortunately, this is seeming increasingly difficult. As Linden Labs has placed a limitation on the size of httprequests (2048 bits = 256 bytes) and a limitation on the number of httprequests a user can make per time unit. This limitation makes a sense from a Linden Lab business prospective as it forces developers to upload their content to LL's servers.
If Linden Lab were to open up the second life connections to the internet it would be very nice to see how the web 2.0 applications would integrate with second life. For example imagine you could integrate a web calender directly into your Second Life, or post events directly from second life to your google calendar.
I would like to see LL become the paypal of VWs and let developers do whatever they want to do.
2 comments:
You gave a couple of good examples - another is news sources with up to date news actually in SL, and not as a link to an outside blog.
Since every image upload costs the user L$10, everytime you want to change or update information you get hit by the upload surcharge. There's no way people will create dynamic sources of information given the current structure.
I suppose it does make economic sense in a limited way, but not when you think of the kinds of things the it restricts people from doing.
I would encourage you to get in touch with LL and share your ideas and point them to our blog. This is as interesting to them as it is to us and maybe you can start a dialog. I have found them friendly and cooperative (at least with island owners:-) If need be we (DW) can help establish the contact.
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