Google Sidewiki

23.09.2009

Google launched its new Sidewiki feature. Sidewiki opens an annotation sidebar on every Web page. Sidewiki is a Google Toolbar feature. You can leave notes (annotations) on every Web page and see notes of other people. The annotations appear is a sidebar. This is not the browser sidebar, but an extension driven page element. The feature looks quite advanced. It has rating system integrated, crowd driven spam identification, you can choose to see only annotations in your language. While posting an annotation you can send the same text also to your blogs. Of course, it is integrated with your Google profile so that people reading your contributions can learn more about you. 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.

Weblin offline

14.09.2009

Weblin went offline early this morning. The shutdown has been announced earlier.

Weblings launch

14.09.2009

The "layered reality" game Weblings by http://www.WebWars.com today launches officially. Read more at VentureBeat

Weblin Closes

07.08.2009

Layered virtual world Weblin is ceasing operations. A newsletter sent to all subscribers advertises the 3D chat system ClubCooee as a possibility for weblin users to keep contact after the shutdown of weblin. But from the point of view of virtual presence systems they could also advertise Second Life or IMVU instead of ClubCooee. ClubCooee is not a layered virtual world or virtual presence system. There is now only system that would count as a replacement: RocketOn.

WebWars

09.06.2009

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

Adding Gameplay to Google.com

09.04.2009

An intresting review of virtual presence systems

VPTN-3 submitted to IETF MMOX

05.03.2009

VPTN-3 has been submitted to the emerging IETF working group MMOX for consideration as MMOX data protocol: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-wolf-vp-identity-00 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.

RocketOn goes beta

27.01.2009

RocketOn reaches the next level. The company now enters the public beta with its avatars-and-virtual-goods-on-web-pages service. Web surfers can find and buy virtual goods everywhere on the Web. Shops and random loot will appear on many Web pages, not just the RocketOn Web site. Within the next months RocketOn plans to announce partnerships with brands to sell branded items. http://www.rocketon.com/a/about_press.php http://www.virtualgoodsnews.com/2009/01/qa-steve-hoffman-and-bryan-suchenski-of-rocketon.html

PMOG Chat

16.12.2008

PMOG is a Firefox/Flock extension which lets you play an MMOG on the Web. Web pages are treated as virtual places. You can put items, like mines, treasure chests, watch dogs on web pages. Other people will find them. You can create quests for other people, do your own quests, earn virtual currency, and level up. 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.

IOSurf v3.0

04.11.2008

Everything is now run from the toolbar. You can see who is at a website, or who was recently at a website, view their profile, add comments, send messages, etc. 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/

iA (Internet Adventure)

07.08.2008

There are hints, that Sega is developing a 3D virtual world which plays on the desktop (even behind desktop icons) instead of a window or full screen. The video shows a presentation of the system. The interesting point with respect to virtual presence is the fact, that a user navigates a web browser to control her position in the virtual world. Any time the browser changes the page, the avatar is moved to a different location. The landscape changes and other people appear. This sounds (and looks) very much like virtual presence with a 3D display behind the browser on the desktop, not on the browser and not in a separate window, but still: the location in the virtual world and the people you meet is controlled by the URLs you navigate.

Overlay Virtual Worlds

07.08.2008

Virtual presence seems to slowly enter the mainstream. Weblin and RocketOn are mentioned in a recent 50-Virtual-Worlds-Tour video. The term they use is ""Layered Virtual Worlds" or "Overlay Virtual Worlds". They overlay the Web and create a virtual world on top of web content. Raph Koster calls them the emerging “overlay avatars” space. We do not have a common name yet. Terms I have seen: Layered Virtual Worlds Layered Social Virtual World Layered World Overlay Virtual World Overlay Avatar Space Overlay Avatars The social web hype points into the same directions. It is partially driven by social networks, which are large, but have no reach beyond their own domain. They try to reach out like Facebook. It is also driven by people who develop social web browsers and social search tools with decent Venture Capital support. Virtual worlds in general get hundreds of millions US$ investments since Second Life got millions of users and Habbo, Runescape, Barbie Girls, and others even millions of revenue. Even Google participates in embedded virtual spaces. Every week someone announces a new virtual world or an embedded 3D space. The market is by far not full with respect to penetration of the user base. But seems to fill up quickly with respect to available systems. It will be interesting to see how layered wirtual worlds grow in this environment. A key difference between virtual worlds (embedded or fullscreen) is that they run while people use the web. Layered virtual worlds do not compete with other virtual worlds. They rather share the web browsing time and run while the user is outside of virtual worlds anyway. But they do compete for attention, money, and the user's willingness to register with yet another virtual world and create yet another avatar. The family of layered virtual worlds is still very small. Expect it to grow once the big players discover this new space. They will discover the chance to break out of the crowded virtual world market soon, probably less than 24 months. Interesting times for virtual presence aka layered virtual worlds.

Skabble

13.07.2008

Skabble just started with an interesting virtual presence application. Skabble is an instant messenger with a special focus on meeting people on web pages. There is a small indicator on every web page in the lower left corner (similar to weblin and RocketOn) that shows how many people are on the same page. You can click on it and open a kind of browser "sidebar" at the lower border, which shows a chat window. You chat with people on the same domain name or sub-domain. You can chat with people on the same page, but also (and interestingly) with people visiting other similar pages. Web pages are categorized and you can click on the category. Categories are (currently?) drawn from the DMOZ open directory project. This means that only big sites are categorized. But it is a very interesting idea. Links: http://mashable.com/2008/07/08/skabble/ http://skabble.com/

ROCKETON

02.06.2008

ROCKETON recently started the alpha phase of their virtual presence client. I am very excited about this system, because it seems to be a fully featured virtual presence system. Fully featured is almost too weak. In addition to the usual "chat with avatars on any web pages", it has public chat, a buddy list, items, a shop, avatar customization, worm holes, interactive items, and probably much more. ROCKETON Inc. is a San Francisco based company. The team seems to be very strong. They have experience lots of in the gaming industry and where responsible for major game titles. The company is quite well equipped with at least 5 Mio US $. The client is in Flash 9. It produces a small icon in the lower right corner. Once you activate it it opens a flash based tool bar at the lower border of the browser. Activating it on a page also shows your and other people's avatars. The flash is a layer above the web site. You can not click the page content while it is active. Rather, clicking directs the avatar to go to the position. Avatars walk over the entire page and beyond. The display always tries to keep my avatar on the screen by scrolling the scene. Other avatars are shown by small circles at the web page border to indicate that they are off the visible area, nice concept. The protocol is straight forward. It uses a Comet style long-polling to keep a connection always open which the server can use to send a message to a client. Definitely the way to go in an HTTP environment. If you can sustain thousands of TCP connections on the server. I suppose they can. At least it's not a prefork-apache. If I chat a small text, then I see a HTTP POST (formatted and stripped down to the important stuff) with HTML form data: POST /chat-web/chat?Chat HTTP/1.1 Host: chat.rocketon.com Cookie: JSESSIONID=xxxxxxxx Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-Length: 86 GZeNqzSc7JTM0riS8oyi/JT87PseNSULBJzkgssbNRjHZ2cQxxjE7LLCouUQCJxcba2eiDJbmANJpGAL2cGcs= The chat text seems to be encrypted. It is not just base64 encoded as the trailing "=" suggests. (OK, you got me). I get a response immediately, which has the text I just typed and my position. This probably also goes to all other people on the page at the same time. The message is delivered as a HTTP response to an open request with XML body. HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/xml; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Length: 281 Server: Jetty(6.1.9) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <events> <event type="message" room_name="www.google.com"> <member username="Wolfspelz" uid="107511" x="176" y="619" /> <message>GZeNqzSc7JTM0riS8oyi/JT87PseNSULBJzkgssbNRjHZ2cQxxjE7LLCouUQCJxcba2eiDJbmANJpGAL2cGcs=</message> </event> </events> The client immediately opens the next long-poll request: GET /chat-web/chat HTTP/1.1 Host: chat.rocketon.com Connection: Keep-Alive Cookie: JSESSIONID=xxxxxxxx No I walk and my client sends the final position, no intermediate positions: POST /chat-web/member HTTP/1.1 Host: chat.rocketon.com Connection: Keep-Alive Cookie: JSESSIONID=xxxxxxxx x-method: PUT Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Content-Length: 11 x=647&y=528 As expected I get a message as a long-poll response: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Type: text/xml; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Length: 188 Server: Jetty(6.1.9) <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <events> <event type="room" room_name="www.google.com" action="moved"> <member username="Wolfspelz" uid="107511" x="647" y="528" /> </event> </events> And then the obligatory long-poll request to set things up for the next seerver to client message: GET /chat-web/chat HTTP/1.1 Host: chat.rocketon.com Connection: Keep-Alive Cookie: JSESSIONID=xxxxxxxx I wish they would use location mapping and an existing chat protocol. But you can't have it all. I wonder why ROCKETON requires to open Port 843 outgoing. That's clearly the Flash player 9 policy file download. But they do HTTP long-polling and they install as a browser helper. Why do they still need the flash policy. The flash policy is for socket connections. They should be able to do without by loading everything via the browser's HTTP client or by using a custom HTTP client. Images and everything visible is usually HTTP. The chat protocol also as described above. No idea yet why they need flash socket connections in addition to HTTP. So much for now. Links: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/11/rocketon-gets-5-m-for-embeddable-virtual-kids-world/ http://www.rocketon.com/ http://www.rocketon.com/a/

BumpIn

02.06.2008

I just ran into a (relatively) new browser sidebar, that lets people chat on web pages. My #9 on the browser-extension-for-chat-on-web-pages list. It looks very nice, includes a buddy list, and a discussion feature where you can discuss about all web pages. So, you can actually leave notes on a web page and othe rpeople can comment. BumpIn also provides a Web Widget that can be integrated into web pages as a chat channel on the page, comparable to so called "shout boxes". On top of that, BumpIn has a zero-install mode where the target page is iframe-d. That makes it my #6 prefix-your-URL-and-get-an-IFRAME system. "Often we cross paths on the Internet, now we can BumpIn! Ever wondered who else is doing the same thing as you on the Web? Wanted to connect with those who share your interests? Now you can BumpIn! BumpIn lets you discover people with similar interests, chat with them and make friends. BumpIn will redefine the concept of social browsing and networking." BumpIn is primarily programmed in Flash/ActionScript. It requires the Flash 9 player. The protocol seems to be pretty straight forward. Requests go with mimetype application/x-www-form-urlencoded. Responses are XML. If I send a "testchat" on the web site "http://www.heise.de/newsticker", then the form-POST looks like: server=bumpin_saosy &from_mailbox=mailbox_cbort &mtype=broadcast &nick_name=Wolfspelz &text=testchat &url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eheise%2Ede%2Fnewsticker &uid=252944 The response is basically a "ok, thanks": <message> <rtype>response</rtype> <mtype>r_broadcast</mtype> <reply>success</reply> <reply_url>http://www.heise.de/newsticker</reply_url> </message> Half a second later I see a www-form-urlencoded request: server=mailbox_cbort &mtype=get_msgs &digest=a96280cb4075d60f30d6e02db0db5588 &uid=252944 And my chat text in the response: <message> <rtype>response</rtype> <mtype>r_get_msgs</mtype> <reply>success</reply> <msg> <type>broadcast_msg</type> <from_uid>252944</from_uid> <text>testchat<</text> <from_url>http://www.heise.de/newsticker</from_url> <from_mailbox>mailbox_cbort</from_mailbox> <nick_name>Wolfspelz</nick_name> </msg> </message> BumpIn seems pretty solid. My impression is, that we are approaching the second generation of these browser based virtual presence tools. BumpIn has the necessary features. I am tempted to say the "usual" features, like chat, buddies, discussion, but not much more. It looks like the developers have seen earlier tools and that they just did the right things omitting ballast and special gimmicks. In other words: the typical feature set seems to settle down. No company address is given, so I have to guess, sorry guys. The BumpIn domain is registered to a Pakistani address. That fits to the team page, which is quite cool actually. BumpIn went into beta in 2007. It's out now. Still small scale, but if the blogosphere picks it up it can soar quickly. BTW: I am curious when we see the next avatar/chat balloon system. BumpIn is still in the typical sidebar/chat-in/chat-out paradigm. BumpIn.com

VPTN-5 published

15.05.2008

Bots in chat rooms of virtual presence locations may appear like avatars of real people. They can not be distinguished easily. This document specifies a way to describe the purpose of a bot. The description is primarily machine readable so, that client software can compare user preferences with the description and inform users appropriately. VPTN-5: Bot Tagging

VP mapping log

07.05.2008

Changes to the location mapping system (LMS) will now be published in a blog: http://lmsoplog.blogspot.com/ Please add your comments and suggestions.

Me.dium turns away from VirtualPresence

30.04.2008

Browser sidebar Me.dium concentrates on presence and actions of friends. It now has similar functionality to Flock, the social browser. What strikes most is, that you won't be able to meet new people as in the past. The original idea of meeting people who have the same interests is gone. Me.dium takes away a feature, adds better one to replace it

VPTN-4 published

29.04.2008

This document describes how virtual presence (VP) uses XMPP [1][2] as a VP transport protocol. It describes extensions to XMPP multi user chat [3] (MUC). Basically, VP uses plain XMPP and MUC plus few extensions to MUC. The extensions augment the user representation with additional user information like avatars, avatar positions and states. VPTN-4: XMPP

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