Second Life Influx?
So all of a sudden I am seeing an influx of Second Life people joining the onXiam community!
One new member after another is showing up on the latest page, and most if not all of them seem to be somehow tied to Second Life. For instance, new member Eauxpie is "Richard Linden" in Second Life. Eauxpie, I'm singling you out because it seems like you were the first one to start this rush! Can I ask where you found out about onXiam?
So welcome to all of the new people who share the revered Linden name in Second Life! Thank you for spreading the word!
I hope you like onXiam. There are more cool things to come.
-Kevin
One new member after another is showing up on the latest page, and most if not all of them seem to be somehow tied to Second Life. For instance, new member Eauxpie is "Richard Linden" in Second Life. Eauxpie, I'm singling you out because it seems like you were the first one to start this rush! Can I ask where you found out about onXiam?
So welcome to all of the new people who share the revered Linden name in Second Life! Thank you for spreading the word!
I hope you like onXiam. There are more cool things to come.
-Kevin
posted by Kevin Poulsen at 12:00 PM
18 Comments:
Alright, I'm to blame. Actually, I just signed up with 360voice and read the blog post. I guess now I'll be blamed when Lindens get feature requests the next time they play on XBox Live...:)
Eauxpie a.k.a. Richard Linden
Hey, I'm glad to have you and everyone else here. And I know the 360Voice guys are happy to have you signed up over there too!
Welcome aboard!
Hi Kevin! Thanx for the warm welcome. As someone who gets confused easily, I found your signup process really easy and quick! I was adding identities within seconds. Literally. And yeah thanx to the good word of Richard, I am here too... my oh my.
I blogged too, just a snippet but... thank you: http://torley.com/the_lindinvasion_of_onxiam.htm
I like the service as well, although I wish the urls were better. My profile page should really be something like:
http://www.onxiam.com/users/dp
Or even better:
http://dp.onxiam.com/
This second scheme greatly improves onxiam's pagerank as well, incidentally. Also, you really should add various IRC networks, at the very least:
efnet
freenode
Thanks.
Donovan
(Donovan Linden)
PS Is it really that hard to design good urls in ASPX? From casual browsing, it appears ASPX apps are the most frequent abusers of urls (it's a very close tie to php, or I guess old-skool perl cgis)
Hi Donovan -
Thanks for the comments, and believe me when I say that non-friendly urls are a real thorn in my side.
It is indeed a combination of working with .aspx and also the webhost that I am using (they won't let me install an ISAPI filter which is really all I need to take care of the issue). I'm always looking for ways to get that fixed, but as of now I haven't been able to find one.
I will certainly keep my eyes open and try to come up with a way to get nice clean urls. I would like nothing more!
I'll also try to get the IRC networks you listed up there ASAP. There are just so many communities online...I add them as I find them. I'm working on building a page that will let the users add sites themselves, but it is not ready yet.
Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for the comments and the blog link, Torley. I appreciate it!
Just curious, do you have any concerns over identification issues? I understand how hellish it would be to implement verification for /every/ service, but it seems like some reassurance that someone is who they say they are on a certain service could be a definite value add. Opt-in, of course, because the ease of just benig able to throw my information at this and /not/ have to go through verification on every level is also nice, heh.
And I found out about your site via Torley and have pointed people on Electric Minds here. (Any chance you can add it as a supported site? Shouldn't be too hard...)
YAYZERAMA! You're super welcome, Kevin. Nice to see you here, Erbo!
Oh Kevin, misc. question for you:
Are we going to be able to change profile pictures soon? I noticed this placeholder:
http://www.onxiam.com/img/member.png
It looks like it should be changeable, but I didn't see a place to do that while editing. Pls advise... thx!
Just a couple more feature suggestions, since everyone else is throwing em here.
I'd like to see more meta data related to some of the locations. For example:
- It would be great to be able to specify a slurl for the SL id. www.slurl.com - basically just a url that points to a location in SL. :)
- The WoW id really needs a field to specify the server. While my identity is unique to my shard, it isn't unique to all of WoW.
- A Guild or Clan field would be great for most games as well.
Torley is also partly to blame for the ensuing resident invasion. Muha.
Verification is an obvious feature request (add the onXiam profile URL on the profile page then click a "verify me for X" button next to each identity I'm guessing).
However....
It would be rather lovely if you could get an OpenID server up and running. Either that, or supporting it would be fun start.
Another SLer ;0 I came here through Torley!
I love how easy it is to use, but with so many disparate communities it's impossible for one person to keep up a list of all of them. Do you anticipate a more automated process in the future?
On that note, I saw you were missing jabber.
Great service so far-- glad we can manage our seven million identities... and since none of these services seem interested in talking to each other (although that's changing), it's good to see someone stepping up with an app that's useful and what the everyday user wants.
Does it pass the mom test! Most definately!
Torley - How observant of you! Yes, you'll soon be able to replace the generic placeholder image with your own jpeg. Hopefully by this weekend.
Erbo - Electric Minds has been added.
Kelly - Hmm, I hear what you're saying about needing more meta-data for some sites. It's a bit tough because by the add an identity page is generic by design (on ____ i am ____. the end.), but you're right. Sometimes that's not enough. Let me put my thinking cap on. I'll try to find something that will address the issue while not becoming too intrusive...or a maintenance nightmare for me! :)
Baba - You can bet that the first enhancement to roll out is going to be a self-serve "add a site to the mix" page. I'll try to have it up this weekend.
qdot & signpostmarv martin - While I understand your questions about identity verification, at this point in time I decided that I would not focus on that. I made a brief mention as to why in this earlier post, but since you brought it up again, I think it warrants another. But in short, it really comes down to: that is an extremely complex issue that is being addressed (quite well) by other companies at the moment. Companies such as Sxip who gave a fantastic presentation outlining their extensive identity verification model at the ETech 2006 conference. Rather than focusing on the protection/verification side of things, I chose to build onXiam to focus on the discovery side of things. I built it to help me manage my identities...and if you read my About page, to help my Mom understand how this "internet thing" works. :)
So while identity verification is a very relevant issue, right now it's not one that I'm focused on. I am focused more on the linking and discovery of identities that you want to share. Adding your real identity (name, location, etc) is purely optional, and I also made sure that you could keep identities in your profile private too.
Another tough thing about verification is...how to do it? Not all communities online offer any kind of verification webservices, so "how" it becomes a very difficult question. Again I'll refer back to Sxip because that seems to be the core of what they are addressing: How do I know you are who you say you are?
Here on onXiam, I'm asking important questions like "I like this person's photos on Flickr...I wonder if I could play Xbox Live with them?"
I'd better stop now...I think I have the beginnings of another blog entry in this comment!
Thank you everyone for your comments and questions. Seriously. It helps me a lot to hear them.
-Kevin
You could handle meta data and other extended options like the Skype "Call me" and whatnot with an expandable menu. Ajax maybe?
That way you can keep the simplicity of the on X i am Y language and not break the flow of the page unless someone wants to get at those options.
Again, you've done a great job with this! Keep up the good work !
My mentioning of OpenID was more for the "On OpenID I am:" stuffages, rather than identity verification.
With regards to the photo thing, script-fu to locate a profile photo from each service, pick one to use as main and cache it/them all.
With SL, you'd have to do a resident name to key check, probably using something like http://w-hat.com/name2key
Then it's a simple case of http://secondlife.com/services/user/small_image/<insert resident UUID>.jpg , which for me results in this
This might just be me being really geeky, but it'd be nice if you could include support for XFN and any other appropriate Microformats.
signpostmarv - No worries! I'm plenty geeky too. In fact, I was just at the Supernova conference a couple weeks ago and I was quite impressed by the presentation given on microformats. It definitely made an impact on me and I would love to look into incorporating then into the site somehow. So much to do!
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