Thought Balloons: Twitter Feed Imported Into Second Life

The random thoughts of Internet users around the world bubble up into Second Life-- here including, if I'm not mistaken, the words of blogging legend Dave Winer.  (Click pic to see.)  A bit like Parsec, this is a mixed reality applications that's immediately cool, while also hinting at practical applications: created by UK developer Daden Limited, the Twitter Fountain of Second Life takes the public feed from the Web 2.0 site, converting each Tweet into a literal thought balloon that burbles up from a koi pond located on Daden's SL island. (Visit the Twitter Fountain by clicking the SLURL teleport at this link; YouTube video at this link.)

As to practical applications, an immediate one comes to mind: imagine if the bubbles in the Twitter Fountain clustered around proper nouns.  You'd wind up with a 3D, dynamic, interactive model describing what global Internet users were thinking at any given moment.  Represented by a sky of bubbles.

Comments

[Rhiannon Chatnoir]

Yes, the power of what you can do with RSS feeds even by dragging them into SL is a wonderful thing.

During the LL birthday celebrations, I created a SL virtual art installation that was a "message in a bottle" that employed a similar thing. It consisted of a giant bottle you could walk into that had objects and art images washing ashore. I also created one unified feed with yahoo pipes and then used it to bring a feed of my twitter, flickr photo titles, jaiku, facebook, etc. which would look like it was pouring out into the sand from the ocean inside the bottle.

Granted that was more a fun, conceptual example of the power of RSS into SL, but yes you could create 3D visualizations of real time thoughts. Good stuff :)

[Rhiannon Chatnoir]

can check out a picture of it here: http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1132/654690260_0c68c313e3_o.jpg

[Sophrosyne Stenvaag]

We've got a Twitter Fountain on display in Extropia's South Park - Extropia Core (49, 41, 22) - everyone's welcome to come check it out. It's hypnotic!

[dandellion Kimban]

I love it. It's some kind of conceptual art. All those thoughts floating in the air. And it is fun to fix the camera on the balloon and let go with it over the sim. But soon enough it will have to be configurable so user can feed an account or accont's friends. And those bubblles have to be modable.

[Roland Hesz]

What I see as an immediate use is communicating with friends while being offline, like somehow tweaking this that a feed could get into an IM.

[JoeLittle]

This is fabulous. If people are keen on this type of representation of the web then they should take a look at Jonathan Harris' www.wefeelfine.org The guy is a genius.