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sooner than expected, Linden Labs yesterday announced integration of voice-messaging into Second Life for Q2/2007, with a beta-run starting as early as next week. while residents have been using Skype and other popular teamspeak-applications since ages, the native SL-feature will go further by offering 3D-enabled, spatial audio. if done properly, this will increase the VR-experience massively.

on-/offline application development-platform Apollo gets presented to the web industry at Adobe Engage. lots of coverage… Read/WriteWeb has a good summary of what could be one if this years hottest products.

Search Engine Land congratulates Flickr on its upcoming 3rd birthday. the photo-sharing community which is now owned by Yahoo! pioneered the frontiers of Web 2.0 in many ways, mainly by bringing tagging and other Ajax-UI paradigms to the mainstream. happy birthday!

as reported by Robert Scoble & 3pointD, a new Second Life-competitor is currently being developed in Australia: like SL, Outback Online is based primarily on user-generated content, but promises better scalability by use of P2P-technologies, better 3D-graphics and the ability to host much larger user-audiences than SL. however, this is private beta, no screenshots whatsoever, and their blog seems to be only a week old. smells a bit like vaporware to me, but only time will tell.

another virtual reality just launched into (sort of) public beta recently is Papermint. however, comparing the austrian project to SL seems a bit unfair, since it’s hardly more than a graphically enhanced chatroom aimed at technically non-inclined beginners. the java-based client replaces common 3D-graphics with simple semi-perspectives similar to paper-cuts and from what I have seen on my brief visit, content is predefined mostly. furthermore, I guess creator Avaloop kept beta-accounts a bit too scarce - I hardly met other users in Papermint. if you want to try it anyway, keep in mind that it’s german-only.

Linden Labs has published some detailed metrics on Second Life-usage from their launch back in september 2003 to january 2007 (link to excel-sheets). the blog-post also explains the inner workings of the LindeX (Linden-Doller exchange market). though most metrics are quite impressive and indicate solid growth of the virtual world, total hours spent online still lacks behind. while total population (unqiue residents, alternate accounts adjusted) increased by almost 2000% during 2006, total hours spent rose “only” by 450%. interestingly, removing the requirement of holding a credit-card for account-registration last spring didn’t affect the age-structure of SL-users: the average resident is 33 years old, with a total of only 1% under the age of 18.

according to Reuters, Comverse Technology is going to demo a java-based Second Life-client for mobile-phones at the upcoming 3GSM conference in Barcelona. given CPU-power & memory on mobile platforms is scarce, Comverse’ solution relies on a proxy-PC bridging the mobile client with the SL-servers. during a demonstration, a mobile-connected avatar was able to move around the virtual world and use SL’s chat-features. Comverse is also plannung to use the same technology to connect IPTV-appliances with Second Life.

“First Life is a 3D analog world where server-lag doesn’t exist” - join 6 billion users and register at getafirstlife.com! …according to the comments on creator Darren Barefoot’s blog, Linden Labs takes the joke with a wink and grants Darren all rights to proceed the parody…big up!

The Ad Generator produces fake advertising by mashing up real-life corporate slogans with (tag-)related flickr-images.

10 things you should know about wordpress 2.1, which should be released later today. the feature I’m mostly looking forward to? AJAX-ified auto-saving of post-drafts (good bye lost posts due to browser-crashes).

Wikipedia - in an attempt to fight spam - adding the nofollow-attribute to all external links has been the major topic of today. Google Blogoscoped introduced (me to) an interesting strategy handling the attribute, which seems way more reasonable: as done before, external links within user-generated comment (comments, wiki-pages…) are initially set to nofollow. however, the attribute is automatically removed after a few days, assuming that the link, since it hasn’t been removed by the moderator (or, in case of Wikipedia, the editing community) is valid and therefor accountable for page-ranking. sounds smart to me…

only a week after Linden Labs released the sources of their SecondLife client, hackers start releasing some inspiring modifications. like Matt Biddulph, who is manipulating virtual objects by feeding data from an external, analouge potentiometer into SL.

Wordpress receives another security-related upgrade - everybody upgrade to 2.0.7!

Google Blogoscoped has a detailed description of the latest Google security-exploit, which apparently now has beend fixed. the exploit was based on the possibility of hosting malicous content on a google.com subdomain, alllowing attackers to capture any visitors Google-cookie.

IBM-developers re-created a virtual representation of the Australian Open tennis-stadium within SecondLife. the build can replay tournament-games by receiving real-time tracking-data from the real world. 3pointD claims that about 1.000 IBM-employees by now are engaged in SecondLife.

for your eyes & inspiration: smashing magazine collected 50 light and 30 dark gorgeous web-designs (more to come, as this is planned to be a 5-part series).

the official Linden Blog features the transcript of yesterdays Town Hall talk with Cory Linden, CTO of Linden Labs. obviously, Cory mostly addresses issues regarding the recent open sourcing of the SecondLife client-software, like possible plugin-infrastructures, the installation of CVS and if/when Linden’s server-software is following the client’s path into public. not very much definitive info, but there is a roadmap promised to be released later this quarter.

Arrington predicts the death of DRM. so be it. and quick!

all the hype & gorgeous pics about Apple’s iPhone aside, consider what David Pogue from the NYT - one of very few with actual hands-on experience - is reporting:

Both in the onstage demo and during my hands-on hour, the Web speed was OK—not great, but OK. But all of this used the phone’s built-in Wi-Fi, not Cingular’s notoriously slow Edge network. I couldn’t help wondering how bad the speed will be when you’re connecting over the cellular airwaves.

lets hope Apple adds 3G-support until this sweety is launching in europe (Q4/2007).

Ryan Carson points out that the iPhone is the first mobile platform really suitable for mobile web-apps. I’ld like to add that it really is the first mobile device capable of running AJAX-apps (given that it runs a fairly decent port of Safari, with full Javascript-support). since the phone is based on Mac OS, I’ld also bet that a Flash-plugin isn’t too far away.

sitepen has an interesting post on how offline web-applications implemented with the Dojo Offline Toolkit (DOT) could look & work like. including detailed mock-ups of a - fictional - offline Gmail-prototype. offline webapps could be the next big thing, but DOTs approach (basically installing a local proxy-application) doesn’t seem very intriguing to me.

endless.com - Amazon’s speciality shopping site for handbags and shoes is the eCommerce giant’s answer to niche-site like.com - though it lacks adavanced features like visual search.

two years ago, Technorati was one of the first sites to introduce the concept of tagging (aka ‘folksonomy’, a term relating to taxonomy). a good time for an update of their tag-pages…

earlier than probably expected by most, Linden Labs released the source-code of their SecondLife client under GPLv2 today. while this move already earned a lot of praise among the community, the biggest steps towards an open virtual world - i.e. opening up backend-services and grid-servers - is yet to be done. on the downside, it remains to be seen how this affects the already shattered stability of SecondLife in the short term.

rumours of Yahoo! aquiring MyBlogLog seem to get a second rehash…bloggers seem to remain more skeptical this time

more news from Yahoo! at Read/WriteWeb: Yahoo! Go 2.0 is the company’s answer to Google’s latest mobile efforts like their mobile Gmail-app. the java-based mobile client integrates various Yahoo!-services like search, maps, mail, photos (flickr) and news.

a major security-vulnerability in popular open-source blogging-tool Wordpress has been disclosed. Automattic responded immediatelly by releasing version 2.0.6, which takes care of the issues. might be a good hint for all users to subscribe to their developer-blog (I wonder if the hosted software at wordpress.com uses the same codebase and is/was therefor prone to the same exploits?).

TechCrunch.com added oldschool forum-functionality today. very minimalistic. I wonder how they’ll avoid cannibalization of their very own, charged-for, job-board?

btw., another tech job-board launched this week, can be found at Read/WriteWeb.

video-feed of Lawrence Lessig’s talk at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress (23C3), December 2006 in Berlin. quoting BoingBoing:

If you want to understand what computers do to culture and why the law is totally out of synch with that, watch this. I especially love that Larry describes why neither hacking nor lobbying will solve the problem — but sets out a strategy that will win, a real path to victory.”

since yesterday, podcast-indexing & speech-recognition service Podzinger allows users to search for keywords within YouTube-videos.

MobVendor is a SecondLife vending-machine, that adjusts product-prizes to the number of people avatars near the point-of-sale - the more avatars, the lower the price. 3pointD has the lowdown on crowdpricing in SecondLife.