User:Diva Canto
I'm Crista Lopes in RL. I became interested in SL in March 2007, and have been hacking it since. Along with Felix Wakmann, we developed SLBrowser the first sustained search engine for SL. I've also been working with an Engineering company in modeling their futuristic PRT transportation system in SL. Overall, I'm trying to grasp the profound implications that an SL-like system has in the way people interact with/through networked computers.
More about SLBrowser
(For full disclosure of the context of my participation in the discussion of SL's future architecture.)
So far, SLBrowser has been an experiment in many dimensions:
- Information collection: can we find large amounts of information without having any special access to it? The answer is yes.
- Information filtering and privacy: in a world where everything is available for avatars to see, what should be indexed for public searching purposes and what should be thrown out? What kinds of information are sensitive? Is this any different from the Web? The answers to these questions are a bit more elaborated, so I won't provide them here. But we're finding that this is subtly different from the Web in terms of the kinds of content that people "publish."
- Ranking: what kinds of heuristics make sense here? I won't tell much about this, but we have been experimenting with interesting metrics.
- Marketing: SLBrowser is also a marketing experiment. Will vendors be interested in advertising in a SL search engine, like they do on web search engines?
More importantly, SLBrowser is also an experiment in testing whether Linden Lab is serious about scaling SL to become a platform instead of a proprietary system. The "Search" button of the SL Viewer can easily be opened up to point to external search service providers... Will LL do it? Or will they want to continue to hold control over which services are run in the Viewer? To the best of my knowledge, SLBrowser is the first serious contender at plugging in an external service into the grid. I hope many more will follow.