I was reminded recently that Twinity was in open beta, so I signed up and took another look. For those of you not familiar it’s a Second Life competitor that has some real potential.
You customize your avatar in much the same way (except that you can upload a picture of your face and map it quickly and easily) and you get a nice default selection of prefab faces/clothes/bodies just kicking around. The interface seems to be far easier than Second Life’s too, although to be fair I couldn’t figure out how to build.
One feature that was extra nice was the browser pane on the one wall. It was fully functional (I’m watching a YouTube video in the picture above), and I was able to interface with text fields as well as Flash controls.
That said, Twinity isn’t ready. It’s still very beta, and you’ll be dealing with oddities like disconnects and a glitchy file browser. Still, if you want to be way way WAY out on the edge, sign up today!
Last night to my absolute joy I discovered that Draxtor Despres covered the vBusiness Expo:
More business than the Draxtor thinks – there is more business success in SL than the mainstream media thinks, heck, even premiere virtual journalist Draxtor Despres got it wrong last week with asserting non-profits are the only ones to gain traction in SL.
Having most of my life consumed with planning and organizing the vBusiness Expo for the past month, it’s nice to see it all summed up like this. The hype surrounding virtual worlds has been completely dead for some time, and what I think we accomplished with the vBusiness Expo was to demonstrate the simple, practical things that can be done with these platforms to enhance real-world business. No more marketing banter; just the straight facts.
I’m working on creating MP3s of the sessions right now. We’ll be releasing them to the public ASAP, and they’ll serve as a fantastic resource for all sorts of businesses wondering what in the world they would do with a world of their own.
