UberNoggin

Gotta love it when your work becomes a marketing bullet!

One of the oldest debates among Second Life users is about how to merge Second Life better with the rest of the web. Folks have argued for the ability to have interactive HTML browsing inside Second Life for years but the issue has its detractors. A new release from the Electric Sheep might signal a bit of a positive sea-change, though.

Thanks to their involvement in the CSI: New York Project, the Sheep have developed a new viewer interface for Second Life that looks more like a browser.

Notice the back button, “My Stuff”, and “Shopping” buttons on the OnRez viewer. The changes are intended to help newbies who join via the CSI project get around without having to learn too much Second Life jargon. It’s a super smart idea.

According to the Sheep press release, the  new viewer will be available to new users who register through the CSI site and existing SL uses on October 24.

If you’re interested in microblogging ala Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, you might be interested to know that Google purchased Jaiku today. Besides making all the Jaiku employees dance around in celebration of their upcoming stock options, this could mean something big. Other smart folks are talking about it too:

• BlogShmog
• Guardian
• Reuters
• Mashable
• Read/Write Web
• OReilly

This could mean some serious improvements in the way Google IM works. Jaiku’s functionality, if added to gchat, could mean that you could sort your friends, send chat via SMS or a web interface not attached to Gmail. I’m imagining the implications of integrating Jaiku into Gmail and it’s making my head spin a bit. Though, I don’t think any of us should hold our breath. It could be quite a while before Google does anything with Jaiku. Keep your eye on it!

Yep! The social network which is fast becoming all things to all people has assimilated and absorbed another part of your life. You can now check your gmail from inside Facebook with a new app called Fmail. Now you need never leave Facebook! Evaaar!!!

Tonight’s Law & Order Special Victim’s Unit episode, called “Avatar”, will take on a story about under age sex in a virtual environment called “Alternate You.” Looks like a stab Second Life and all the controversy over age verification and the mysteries of the fine line between real life and virtual life. Set your DVRs!

According to the “In the Works” page on Facebook there will soon be a tool that allows you to sort your friends and customize what updates/info is released to each kind of friend/contact. Finally a social network that really gets it! We all intuitively know that we have multiple identities in online spaces. I’ve blogged a ton about it in multiple places but this is the first sign of a social network that understands this and instead of driving you to create your “work identity” in one place and your “social identity” somewhere else, Facebook will soon allow you to sort your contacts according to your whim and disseminate info accordingly.

This will be huge! Why? Because it makes Facebook more powerful and more of a “one stop shop” for communicating with contacts. Most social web 2.0 sites would like to create a platform that you’d never leave, where everything you want to see or know is delivered right to you (along with ads and other revenue generating tools). Giving us the mechanics to manage multiple identities in one spot prevents us from leaving FB to go to another site to communicate with people associated with another facet of our lives. So smart!

The downside is that sorting like this might change the way some recently added apps will work. I’m sure we’ll see some quick “version 2.0″ adjustments made to apps that send info to friends to accommodate choosing which groups of friends see the updates you add to your profile.