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  Linden Lab Opens ‘Second Life’ Map API  
 
 
Posted 2005-12-15 by Tony Walsh
 
 
     
 
Linden Lab, makers of virtual world Second Life has revealed the technical specifications for its mapping system, allowing anyone with a basic grasp of HTML to embed virtual-world maps into their web pages. Now that Second Life's world can be displayed and manipulated within a web page, we can expect new user-created services to spring up--similar to how an open Google Maps system is used as a platform by third-party applications. In particular, advanced web services such as the user-created Roam Search will only become more precise and functional.

It was already possible for Second Life users to visit a specific virtual-world location by clicking a link on a web page. But with a newly-opened map API, we can expect much greater interoperability between the outside world and Second Life's gated community--membership in Second Life is not required to use the API, which in itself is important. I am particularly looking forward to the possibilities for web-based game play involving Second Life's world map, as well as the interesting uses that griefers will come up with for the API.
 
     
 
   
 
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Comment posted by Prokofy Neva
December 15, 2005 @ 12:37 pm
     
 
None of the third-party websites using these applications and features of Second Life sign the TOS. That is, they sign the TOS if they are avatars entering Second Life, but SL then becomes like a "dry county" to them and their "wet country" is the third-party website they use outside the world.

On their third-party sites they can do all kinds of things they couldn't do under the SL TOS. They can libel and slander, verbally haraass, publish private conversations, out RL details or publish false information, etc. They can also harvest IPs, avatar keys, and other kinds of information from the world and then track people's purchasing patterns, their associations, where they travel in world, their expenditures, their residential and store locations -- it's a vast storehouse of information available for the culling with no accountability, oversight, or transparency about its usages to gain advantages over people in Second Life.

I really think a lot more thinking has to be done about what I call Priminent Domain -- highly-technical game dev partners of SL, often long-time players and early adapters -- laying prims (objects) all over the world to do grid-wide projects that have powerful impacts on the citizens of the virtual world.
 
     
 
     
   
 
 
     
 
     
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