The system is built on XMPP with small extensions. It is a browser add-on for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer (!). The addon communicates with the Cheerz XMPP server, joins and leaves XMPP chat rooms as the user enters and leaves pages.

It allows registration via Twitter account, which is cool, automatically assigns an icon and fits well with the current pseudo-realtime-still-asyncronous trend. Google SideWiki is basically the same. You leave notes on Web pages, so lets count OneTrueFan ans the #3 Web Check-In. The race is on.

The buzz says, OneTrueFan is the Foursquare for Websites. OneTrueFan says:

"In its current form, the Web is a largely uninhabited world, where people can only see each others' artifacts and the vast majority of us never leave an imprint on our favorite sites.
OneTrueFan was born out of two ideas: 1) experiences are better when shared and 2) changing human behavior is next to impossible. Our first service enables people to automatically show up on the pages they visit. Other people can then discover them and interesting new content.
OneTrueFan is not a social network in the traditional sense, in that social networks attempt to localize an experience and/or lock users into a single social graph. OneTrueFan is the anti-network, bringing to light the communities that already exist at your favorite sites, with no additional effort on your part."

OneTrueFan is a browser add-on (which will work on any web site) and a Javascript code which web sites can embed into their HTML (which will probably work for all users even if they did not install the add-on).

OneTrueFan appears to be funded with $1.2M. The company was founded July, 2010.

The system is scheduled to launch in a few months.

It seems as if the virtual-presence, layered-virtual-world, check-in-to-web-sites topic is heating up.

Googlin uses the XMPP protocol and Adobe AIR.

It seems as if the Googlin people learned a lot from Weblin. Googlin started development shortly before Weblin ceased operation. There are not many users yet, but they just started the beta. Googlin seems to be supported by a former Weblin investor, the Swiss Mountain Partners Group.

Meebo started as a browser based multi instant messaging system. They got millions of users quickly, expanded to mobile and position also as a social network. Meebo currently reaches 180 million unique users monthly. They just closed another $25M funding, "as content sharing gets hotter" as they say.

Of course, there have been other "check-in systems for the web". Every system listed here checks or checked in users on web sites where they meet other users. But this is the first company to launch a browser bar web check-in at this scale.

Apparently weblin was offline for only a few days, when the community effort kicked in. Weblin can now be downloaded and installed again from http://www.freeavat4r.com. Avatar customization is only rudimentary available. But there are guidelines to create your own avatar.

The toolbar sends every Web page URL to Google's annotations server. This is a technical requirement. Google informs you about it before you activate Sidewiki. Still, sending all URLs to one company is a severe privacy issue. Maybe not so much in the case of Google, because Google tracks our movement anyway through Analytics and the History feature. Anyone who runs the Toolbar with Siterank display already sends the URL stream to Google.

The protocol is a simple unencrypted HTTP Query/POST combination.

Sidewiki is NOT real virtual presence, as you do not see the people who are on the page at the same time. Sidewiki is also not a new concept. Annotations have been here before, as early as 1999. But Sidewiki it is important for virtual presence, because it shows, that a major player is moving closer. A big advantage of annotations compared to virtual presence is the fact, that contributions persist. Chats on a Web page are transient. They are gone after you leave. Annotations stay for some time. You can leave your mark in the world.

Important for virtual presence is, that Google invests in the notion, that Web pages are places. They are not just an anchor for places, like in Lively. The plain Web page identified by it's URL is a place. Can't wait for the next step.

WebWars comes out of stealth and announces Weblings, a "layered reality game” on the web.

"Weblings introduces a strange and beautiful world hidden within the internet, where players can collect, trade and show off their fantastic creatures while surfing their favorite websites."

It looks like Weblings is another free to play layered virtual world on the web like RocketOn and weblin. I bet this is not the last newcomer. The web is a huge virtual world and it is largely untapped. There is so much content and once people start be be present on web pages, there will be big opportunities. Especially browser game companies, which already feel the competition of many other brower games will soon start to see the virtual world on the web as the next frontier.

Closed beta has started. But there are no details available, yet.

This seems to be the same company (at least the same domain address) as the company, which announced WebWars: EVE. WebWars: EVE was supposed to use the EVE-Online IP to create an impressive SciFi game play on the web. They seem to have dropped or pushed back the SciFi theme in favour of a fantasy look and feel.

• http://www.webwars.com
• http://www.webwars.com/weblings/
• http://venturebeat.com/2009/06/09/webwars-introduces-layered-reality-games-on-the-web/
• http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/technology/2009/06/09/0609webwars.html
• http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?setview=features&loadfeature=1641&gameid=14&bhcp=1

The protocol is proposed as input to the MMOX BoF and WG which is currently being chartered. It shows, that the main point of interoperability, namely the instantiation of avatars can be achieved with a very simple yet powerful protocol. It shall serve as a working showcase of light weight interoperation and as a reference point for the discussion.

The protocol is Web/HTTP based, actually the transport is HTTP, the container format is XML and avatar data can use any MIME type. The architecture is inherently distributed by using basically XML to organize asset URLs.

The protocol has been used for 2 years with 3 Mio. users and 25.000 concurrent clients. The primary purpose of the protocol is to enable "simulators" to instantiate ("rez") avatars of users they meet in a virtual world. The protocol has been designed for interoperability, specifically to be able to use avatars from closed virtual worlds on the Web. But it is equally suited to bridge from one world to another. Actually, the Web is regarded as just one virtual world with many regions, which are commonly called Web sites.

The protocol also offers a solution for the "foreign updates" problem, where the avatar changes in one world and the change should be displayed instantly in another world. Say your WoW avatar walks in SL and an effect times out. That should be visible in SL with minimum delay but also without maintaining long lists of subscriptions. The protocol has a lean way to communicate changes.

The protocol addresses the "the low hanging fruit" of simulator interoperability. But it is easily extensible, e.g. to virtual goods ("dragon heads"). It supports variants of avatar models if multiple formats are required. It provides trust using XML Signature (not specified here, but in use). OAuth is the canonical choice for access authentication and selective disclosure of identity data.

I hope that the task of the MMOX WG will be restricted to interoperability between simulators and asset services, and that it will not include the communication between display and simulator. There are so many different models how worlds structure their communication between display and simulator. In some systems the world simulation runs in the client. In many 3D worlds the simulator is regarded as a "server" which forwards scene changes to the display. Games like WoW do much more simulation in the client than Second Life. In the near future there will be simulation including rendering in the cloud with only thin displays. For this reason the MMOX WG should only work on simulator interoperability and keep the display- simulator communication out of the scope.

• http://www.rocketon.com/a/about_press.php
• http://www.virtualgoodsnews.com/2009/01/qa-steve-hoffman-and-bryan-suchenski-of-rocketon.html

The hot news is, that PMOG just added chat to the game application. The chat is a separate window. There are no avatars on the page, yet. But anywhere you go (on the Web) you can join the PMOG chat channel of the page. PMOG uses IRC. A good choice, because IRC is a very mature chat system. Proven server software, lots of clients, simple protocol, and thanks to years of attacks on IRC networks very stable and evolved.

The chat channel name seems to be derived from the web server domain name omitting "www". But i's not just the second level of the DNS name. PMOG can also cope with SLDs. So, there is a bit more sophistication behind than just the server name. The effective mapping is very similar to the virtual-presence.org default URL mapping with the exception, that rooms are of course IRC rooms.

Moving everything from the sidebar to the toolbar greatly improves the usefulness of the application. Also, iosurf has moved from a synchronous to an asynchronous presence system. So, instead of two people having to be at the same website at the exact same time to see each other, now two users can see each other if they've both been to the same website within two weeks. This helps in the visibility of other iosurfers while surfing the web.

3.0 will only be available for firefox for the near future. But it may be ported to IE when it's feature set is more defined.

http://www.iosurf.com/