Already in April I have talked about my Googlized Virtual Office, and my heavy use of the personalized iGoogle website. Recently I found myself in the situation of wanting to look up an avatars profile without actually being logged in into Second Life. So I wrote a Google Gadget to do exactly this.
With the introduction of the new seach a while ago, avatar profiles are accessible from the web (unless the avi has ticked "Publish on web" off). The address is constructed like this:
http://world.secondlife.com/resident/a2e76fcd-9360-4f6d-a924-000000000003
The long number at the end is the UUID of the avatar. The UUID can be acquired in-world when an avatar clicks an object, sits or comes into the range of a scanner. Every object and every avatar within Second Life have a unique UUID - which is not considered to be confidential data. Therefore a couple of external databases exist, which deliver the UUID of an avatar. For any security or privacy concerns regarding this data I suggest this forum thread. My Gadget queries one of these databases and constructs the corresponding URL. It does not actually display the actual profile, but only offers a link which needs to be clicked.
The Gadget can be found here and should be easily integratable into your iGoogle personalized homepage.
6 comments:
The gadget doesn't work for me. Perhaps the databases are overloaded?
I'm not getting a link to click, either. The only results are "profile not found" or no action at all, even when Philip Linden is searched.
Ooooooh, this works perfectly for me! I noticed since I switched my browser from IE to Firefox things like this work much better.
Well, all I can say is that it works for me... However the sourcecode of those gadgets is open by default, so maybe someone can have a look?
Why would you need to look up an avatar when you're not in Second Life?
Also, if you know the avatar's name, such as to be able to look them up in the first place, you can type it into Google, and search it there, and it comes up there.
Yes, there are privacy issues. Also strain on the data base issues.
You can also embed a simple Second Life search form in your website by using this HTML code:
http://pastebin.ca/raw/1062318
That redirects you to search results on the official secondlife.com website.
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