Small Worlds Brings Innovative Lifestreaming to the Virtual World

A while ago I watched a video interview Robert Scoble did with the folks at Small Worlds. This is a new virtual world service that is being compared to Second Life. The difference here though is that it doesn’t require you to download a client and runs right within your browser.  They’ve also managed to create a very simple environment to navigate and interact with compared to many of the other services available.

So why am I writing about this? Well because they have tied in aspects of Lifestreaming in a whole new way that hasn’t been done by anyone else. This virtual world, like most others, has many of the familiar elements such as avatars, homes, and objects you can buy and put in your home. The difference here being that you can tie in social media services to your virtual objects.

Here is an image showing my home and several virtual objects with the associated services that are tied to them.

If you join Small Worlds, you can visit me here

Here are some details about the objects you see in my virtual world above

• The stereo is powered by my playlists at Last.fm
• The Plasma is powered by searches or playlists I create on YouTube
• The mural is powered by images I define from Flickr
• The painting is powered by my tweets from Twitter

But it’s very hard to demonstrate how innovative this service is in a static blog post with images so I’ve created a detailed screencast demonstrating these features for you below.

My Lifestreaming functionality demo in Small Worlds

Note that I uploaded this video in HD quality which is better viewed directly on YouTube here

As you can see this truly does offer a very new innovative way to share your Lifestream. It may not be the quickest or most streamlined way to do it, but definitely the coolest. Time will tell how this functionality plays out on Small Worlds but keep in mind this is just one small aspect of the service. There is a whole lot more going on here including games, missions, and plenty more that make this a must try for anyone interested in virtual worlds. They’ve even created an API that should provide some very interesting extensions for 3rd party developers.

One thing to keep in mind is the fact that the service is free to join and you need to earn gold to buy objects for your apartment. This can be done several ways including completing missions as well as purchasing with real world money.

It would be very cool and interesting to experiment using this with several other users in the room with me. Perhaps I can get a few of you guys to join and help me test that. If you create an account on the service leave a comment with your user details below. Perhaps I can schedule a time to invite you over for a virtual world meetup at my apartment.

Some additional resources to check out

• You can see the video interview Robert did here
• Information and review from BBGsite.com
• Review from TechPluto