Opensim G+ Refugees Seek Social Media that Respects its Users!

Just when the Opensim Hypergrid community were busy welcoming an influx of refugees from InWorldz we then got hit with another bombshell when Google Plus announced they would close their social platform by next summer. The greater part of the Opensim community had come to rely on G+ for keeping in touch with the  many grid servers that make up the Hypergrid across the world, and it worked very well serving our needs for the past six years. There was no problem using avatar names, something that got you banned from the data abusing tech giant Facebook, which most of us avoided anyway. Of course Google was data mining too but they were the best of a bad bunch for our particular needs. However, with the news G+ is to shut down we who have been actively running groups in support of the Opensim Metaverse are being forced to look elsewhere.

So this is a follow-up to my last article to explain how we have got on in our search for an alternative social media site that is similar to Google plus and might offer a new home or Hub for our community where people can easily find other Opensim users across the Hypergrid. This has become so important to us and the perfect way to feed news, help people and promote entertainment and products. Finding something that closely matched G+ is what we were looking for and the list of possibilities is actually quite large according to Wikipedia. However, some stood out and a strong contender was the Diaspora network but  there were others that looked more like Google plus including MeWe and Minds.

Opensim Virtual in MeWe

MeWe has so far proved quite popular with the Opensim community but not everyone. Some take the view that MeWe is just another corporate-run social media and would rather develop a community on the Diaspora network which is open source and decentralized. Diaspora consists of a group of independently owned nodes (called pods) which interoperate to form a network served via a number of clients including  Mastodon, Friendica and others. The Federation protocol is how Diaspora servers (and other servers supporting this protocol) talk to each other. The important thing to understand is that no one server in the network controls all the data so only a local owner or manager can block content. This is very appealing to those that value freedom of speech but has lead to problems where extremists like Islamic State and criminals have used the media to distribute propaganda, communicate with their followers and to radicalise and recruit. This is the kind of thing that the corporate media giants like Facebook and Twitter are now starting to block centrally and will do so more and more as they broaden their definition of what constitutes unacceptable content. So, while the big tech giants take it upon themselves to censor politically unacceptable views and hate speech, the smaller fringe tech companies and groups are highly exposed to extremists that exploit the decentralized networks. Well, that is what we are being told by the mainstream media which, of course, just happens to be owned by the giant tech companies and a handful of billionaires too.

Friendica

Anyway, I registered on the Social iSurf server running Friendica and found other familiar names from the Opensim community were posting so there is certainly interest and one member was talking about setting up a server to run a node for the community. Personally, whereas I like the fact Diaspora is decentralized and members can be part of a federation, I didn't particularly think much of the client projects or that the servers are dependent on a network of enthusiasts which I thought rather limits them. They rely on donations to operate but none have the speed, polish or the millions of users that Google Plus has so I consider it as one to watch but not ideal presently. I also found that the iSurf community was rather geekish and the display Twitter-like so I moved on to MeWe which was recommended to me and I have to say right away I was quite impressed. I really did like the layout and the features so I registered there too and formed a group for Opensim Virtual easily and quickly at no cost. That group has taken off quickly and now has well over a 100 members after just week or so. I promoted it on G+ while I can of course but I didn't just leave it at that. I joined with Nara Malone and we now run the Adult Metaverse group too and that is actually growing even faster with over 200 members already at the time of writing.

I have since also joined the Minds social media and I will come to that shortly but I have to say MeWe is now front runner and other G+ groups have followed us there which is probably helping the growth in membership too as the whole community expands. So far the list includes the "Ruth & Roth 2.0 an OpenSim Mesh Avatar Project", Nara Malone's "Metaverse Authors", Lecktor Hannibal's "Infiniti Grid", Leighton Marjoram's "HG Traveller Opensimulator", Wayfinder Wishbringer's "Elf Clan", Fred Beckhusen's "Opensimulator DreamWorld and DreamGrid"  and the list goes on - like 23 groups I counted so far. I think MeWe is very likely now to become the preferred social media for Opensim simply because it looks good, works well and has useful features including chat. Moreover, the owners setup MeWe with the expressed promise they wont sell user data like Facebook does and they respect free speech. It is not decentralized like Diaspora but there is a degree of central control to block violent extremists and criminals, which is a good thing. Groups are easy to set up at no cost so no group server is required. The system is powerful and not limited by the computing power and connection of a home PC so the way I see it is, what's not to like? 


As I mentioned above I did notice how quickly The Adult Metaverse in MeWe was growing which is not surprising really given that MeWe's very relaxed policy on adult material is encouraging some quite explicit material which, admittedly, if you don't want to see it, can at least be blurred out. So there is that but what we found was many new recruits to the Adult Metaverse expressed an interest in learning about Opensim worlds when asked if they were 18+ and if they were familiar with Opensim. Answering these two questions was a condition of joining the Adult group and the answers we have been getting suggested there is an opportunity here to recruit new people for grids that focus on adult material and services perhaps. But I think there may well be some spillover into the other grids depending on the interests of the recruit.
 
I also joined some of the so-called Blochchain social media sites such as Steemit, Gab and Minds but, though Minds was easy to join and setup a group, I can't say yet I would recommend it. However, once again I created a group for Opensim Virtual and even posted a little but the way this site works, and others using cyptocurrency like it, is you pay for views and, while Minds also rewards its users with crypto-tokens for like liking, commenting, and sharing, you still need to register for a crypto wallet or you can barely get a group started without it. Setting up a wallet and registering with Coinbase is not that hard but the process overall is quite confusing and time consuming given that there are delays in servicing your transactions. But there was more. I bought $62 in Ethereum crypto on Coinbase exchange and added it to my Minds wallet to buy tokens which can then be exchanged for increased views on the network using the "Boost" feature. I wasn't quite prepared for what came next though.

The Adult Metaverse in Minds

Opensim Virtual in Minds got hardly any views in its first few days - about  14 - so I hit the Boost button now I had some credit in my wallet and it took one token for 1000 views which I then realised was half my credit! That one token cost me about $30 which seemed a lot but atleast I had some idea what a token is worth, not that I could cash them out because it would appear you can only use tokens to boost views. I had one token left so I decided to spend it on my second post in Opensim Virtual rather than The Adult Metaverse which I had also set up. This allowed me to compare the views that each of the two groups were getting and, sure enough, it was disappointing. Remember, views don't translate into anything but extra exposure to the Minds community because Minds is not visible to the public like G+ is without registering. The views jumped to the hundreds very quickly but didn't gain a single Like, comment or a new member. Well, I did get some subscribers and, apparantly, I have to send invites to subscribers to join my group - bit of a bother really. Meanwhile, The Adult Metaverse group was crawling along with views in the low 20's.


I did some monitoring of the public wire and I found that quite often the same topics appeared twice, one above the other and some blank even, quite often including my boosted posts so it seemed to me the system is either having teething troubles or it is quite intentional to get the 1000 views used up quickly. Anyway, according to Znet, Minds has amassed one million users since it launched and is growing quickly since it introduced the reward tokens. Bill Ottman, CEO of Minds, told Znet, "We have successfully proven the demand for an open-ad network that allows our users to gain exposure for their content and grow their followings in a better, more rewarding way."  According to Znet, Minds Boost has already rewarded users with over 500 million free ad impressions during 2017.

In fairness to Minds, I did gain some small reward in the form of a percentage of one token for opening the groups, posting a blog article and a few topics. The reward was 0.157 so I did gain something and it looks like I attracted 11 subscribers too which I now have to invite to the group if I want them as members. Unfortunately, the notices about new subscribers doesn't mention which group I gained them from but since I spent my tokens on boosting Opensim Virtual I have to assume they came from people reading that. I'm not sure I like the way this works but from a commerical view point I can see how it might appeal to advertisers.

In conclusion I think it fair to say MeWe is the best option for the Opensim community at this time. It is free, clean and fast, and very similar to G+ in some ways with extra features too. It has become a popular choice very quickly as word has gone round so it is growing fast and any grid or group that uses Opensim would surely loose out if they went elsewhere. The Opensim community is already actually quite big but there is a need to help the grids recruit and it appears MeWe dose see a lot of traffic. For us we want to develop the same kind of community we had in G+ without the costs to get exposure that Crypto social media require or the cost of running servers to open channels in the Diaspora network. Our community is spread over the Metaverse on many servers around the world but we come together in social media to help each other, recruit and promote all we enjoy doing in our virtual worlds. I think MeWe does offer the best service for now and is probably the best way to go.

MeWe: Opensim Virtual
MeWe:The Adult Metavers
Minds, Opensim Virtual
Minds,The Adult Metaverse
Friendica, iSurf

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Google Plus to Close! Where to now for Opensim Virtual?

It is a sad day to learn that Google plus social media platform will be shutting over the next ten months. This really is a bitter disappointment and a blow to the Opensim community that has come to rely on it to reach a wider public than just the Second Life community. I saw the potential to reach existing and new Opensim users as soon as they launched it back in December 2012. It wasn't perfect but it had an easy names policy and I just went for it and created the Opensim Virtual community which everyone knows has been a great success. I think it was the first and grew quickly to lead the field with over 2000 members while others opened their own communities for services and in support of grids. Opensim Virtual turned into a popular community for news and promotions as well as help and friendly advice and social exchange.

I personally feel the loss considering how much time and effort I have put in to developing the community over the years. In the early days I pretty much worked alone in posting topics of interest to give the community life and material of interest. But others saw how useful it was to communicate and promote so it didn't take long before others started posting too. It just kept growing because Opensim was getting better anyway and more grids were opening so that today there are many G+ communities on all kinds of subjects from Hypergrid travelling to support groups for the hundreds of grids that make up the Opensim Metaverse.

Opensim Virtual As it was on day 1, December 2012

Opensim Virtual has always been at the heart of the Hypergrid community along with many other groups so it would be a shame to loose such a powerful platform that brings community together. I don't know yet what I personally will do but there are options and I still have my web site and grid at Farworldz. Perhaps there is a case for using Discord and connect it here on Metaverse Traveller. Each article, rather than having a comments section would display a full Chat window and Opensim Virtual forum to support the community and invite promotions as part of it. There may be other ways that are better. I am going to have to do the research and work on it double quick because time is short.

Opensim Virtual as it is today

All I can say right now is Opensim Virtual is still open and doing well so I have time to promote again once a new plan is set. Just watch this web site and Opensim Virtual for the latest news.

Time to sit down, have a virtual drink ( a real one too!) and think.

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The Metaverse Coming to a Web Page Near you!

Just recently there was mention of a browser based virtual space on the Google plus Opensim Virtual community which piqued my interest because such things have been promised again and again over the past ten years but nothing ever really came of it. However, a topic was posted by Nara Malone of the Opensim Greyville Writer's Colony at Nara's Nook grid where she said a member of her community, Neo Cortex has been developing a Unity based client with the goal of merging Opensim and Unity to make a hybrid system designed with a focus on storytelling. I found it really interesting but there was a comment by Magnuz Binder who let us know he too was working on a virtual web world using ThreeJS and NodeJS as his preferred coding languages. This prompted me to take a closer look and, believe it or not, from what I learnt I had my own web based world online and working in just three days from scratch. I was pretty excited!

Talla's Virtual Space on a Web Page named after her grid, Farworldz
Use mouse to pan the screen and arrow keys to move avatar

Admittedly it is a very simple portal world but my final version had basic movement, a blobby avatar that responded to keyboard controls and a simple text window for chatting. Naturally, I wanted to find out if others could access it so I gave the address to friends and to my delight some of them found it and left messages on the chat window and said it loaded quickly and was easy to use. It is still online (see above) so feel free to check it out and leave a short message. I might do more with it as I learn but in its present form it still serves as good example of what can be done using open source code snippets and learning the basics of Node and Three javascript.

Not just satisfied with my own effort I wanted to know more about other recent developments and from Selby Evans I learned that a new platform based on that same code has been developed by Evie Marie (SingingGirl) who works with Bill Bright out of the Opensim Life grid. The platform is WebWorlds3D and Selby has his own web world based on this code called CyberLounge.

3DWebWorldz.com

Opensim Life is dedicated to education and art. Bill Blight said he was not interested in selling content or offering freebies. He is content to handle the Opensim server and support Evie in her work. He said, "She is the brains behind the webworld part, it is her baby from the ground up , I just beat up the servers once in a while."

I pressed Bill a little more and he replied, "Well again, the Art and Education aspect is all SG, she is the one with the Masters. I'm a code monkey  who swings a big hammer. My grid is focused on people, not commerce, it is a passion project, something to keep me busy. So Art, Education , Entertainment, all things that bring people together is what I/we focus on here."

I liked what they have done but they still have a way to go. I visited the web world as a guest and looked around. I had no problems, the page loaded quickly and I could touch things and interact in a limited way but a whole lot more than I had managed with my version. The avatars are not that great though - a bit stiff and woody but easy enough to control and walk about. I understand there is a company behind all this which is the A2Z Smart Group LLC who are  offering to set up a platform for people with embedded code to place it on a web page. 

National Geographic offers an example of NodeJS for Mars, The Red Planet

Anyway, I also learned that Misterblue (Robert Adams), who is a core developer of Opensim focused on BulletSim which is a port of the Bullet physics engine, has also worked extensively on an infrastructure for a virtual world on the web. His projects include Convoar, an Opensim OAR file converter, Basil for displaying web worlds and Herbal3D, in which the various web world projects he is working on are pulled together.

I was interested to note from Robert Adams research that one of his aims was to build an architecture around creating a web viewer where a High Fidelity avatar can stand next to an Opensim avatar in the same space. And, from recent comments by Philip Rosedale he too spoke of the same design goals.

  

SpotOn3D steaming to a web page

Looking back though, there has been a number of notable attempts at building a web viewer and one of the first caused some controversy when SpotOn3D applied for a patent on the open source code that streamed an Open Simulator world to a web page. That, however, was never a true web viewer like Cloud Party which came later. Cloud Party was developed by some ex-Second Life developers and though it was relatively successful it was taken down when Yahoo bought it out and the developers went to work for them.

Cloud Party on the web

There were others too. Chris Collins, CEO of Tipodean Technologies developed a Canvas web-based viewer and, around the same time, others including Rezzable produced a Unity-based web viewer for Opensim and Katalabs demonstrated an HTML-5/webGL web viewer. Much later there was high expectation from German-based PixiTec who demonstrated the Pixie Viewer which functioned very well and even featured building, mesh with mirrors and 3D printing as an option. Even Kitely, at one time, said they were interested in working with other developers to build a web-based viewer but nothing ever came of any of it.


I recall also that the US Army under the MOSES group were working on a web viewer for Halcyon (the InWorldz fork of Opensim) so I asked Balpian Hammerer, a developer at Discovery Grid that had worked on Halcyon while at InWorldz and he gave a less than enthusiastic reply "They were in the design phase, and the idea was the leveraging of WEB objects to render a scene instead of using a viewer app. I am not enthusiastic that this approach will lead to anything better let alone more efficient. There is much to be said to writing performance critical code as close to the OS native graphics layers especially in limited performance devices like tablets and phones. Too many layers burn cycles which drives up the system requirements. Generic code tends to run much worse when in resource constrained environments like, for example, the 5+ year old computers typical of OpenSim users."

That said recent work by Robert Adams, Evie Marie and others like Neo Cortex and Magnuz Binder and Dahlia Trimble raise the prospect once again that a useful web viewer might be on the way where the Opensim user community can benefit and see their cherished platform's life improved and extended well into the future.

Imaging it, teleporting from an Opensim world to High Fidelity or SineSpace and all done on a web page. Now that would be my idea of what defines a true Metaverse and I think it would do justice to Neal Stephenson's definition in his 1992 Sci-fi novel "Snow Crash" where, to quote Wikipedia, humans, as avatars, interact with other avatars and software agents in a three-dimentional space that uses the metaphor of the real world to describe a virtual-reality successor to the Internet. 

Web Game: HERACLOS and the quest he never asked for

Play Fillory, a fully interactive fantasy game on a web page

FOOTNOTE: I have to confess I knew Dahlia Trimble had been working on a web viewer too and I should have asked for an update. My mistake because, while I was unaware Dahlia's work in this area was was continuing I never the less should have checked. Fact is Dahlia has a very advanced demo and posted it to Youtube very recently and, to quote, "Stress testing a WebGL/emscripten build of one of my viewers with lots and lots of prims. This is a live OpenSimulator 512x512 megaregion on my test..."

Watch the video on YouTube

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Making More of Google Plus Communities and Blogging

I have been running the Google plus Opensim Virtual community for nearly six years now. It was launched on December 8th 2012 when Google announced the social media platform was about to start. My aim was to build a community to try and bring people together in the Opensim Metaverse and it's been pretty successful at doing that. It has always featured top of the list on Hypergrid Business and the membership has grown to over 2000. Many have said OV is a great sauce of news and information about what is happening and, true enough, I have encouraged all that.

I wanted OV to provide a platform to promote Opensim grids, products and services as well as entertainment venues. Today we get a lot of promotions and I found I had to figure a way to limit some and try to push interesting topics to the top of the page, especially if they were getting a lot of comments. More recently I started removing promotions at advertised entertainment events where the event time and date has passed so it has become much more work to maintain. However, it is still proving popular so I don't see me giving up on it any time soon.

I took on another community several years ago too, The Adult Metaverse but mainly as a way to divert more adult material away from what I deemed was family friendly OV. This community I took over jointly with Nara Malone of the Writers Colony at Nara's Nook Grid and together we have kept its focus on adult themes found in Opensim worlds.

 

As far as blogging goes I will admit I have a love/hate affair with it. I do like to write interesting stuff about the open Metaverse and, as always, I promote Opensim when ever there is something I can go on about. I had been very quite in blogging for the past year but recently important events happened that affects everyone that use these spaces. First, Maria Korolov, editor of Hypergrid Business announced she was winding her coverage of Opensim down and would not be publishing her monthly stats update which had been very popular. Then, just recently, the walled garden grid InWorldz crashed due to financial troubles and there was a great exodus of residents to other Opensim grids. How could I not blog about all of this?

So I have been blogging again as well and I have pretty much kept my readers up to date on the recent events. I have published five articles since mid July and the last one was a "Breaking News" scoop when I got a heads-up about the new Infiniti grid. I don't want to lose the momentum so I will be publishing another article again shortly apart from this one and I intend to keep my ear to the ground looking for important news about the Opensim Metaverse.

I think it is time I started covering other platforms related to VR too. I have done so briefly in the past here and there but so many are now in development or active like High Fidelity, SineSpace and Linden Lab's Sansar that I really should draw on it for new material to blog about to add to my coverage of Opensim. So please stay tuned and watch this space.

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ZanGrid to join the Hypergrid And Other Metaverse News

On the 1st February, Zandramas becomes ZanGrid and the Club region will open to Hypergrid visitors so ZanGrid is set to join the open Metaverse and start welcoming a whole new bunch of visitors. 3rd Rock Grid showed the way last year and, after many months of agonizing on the merits and risks of Hypergrid, and working to persuade their residents that it would benefit the grid, they opened up a number of regions and gave their residents the option to be open or remain closed on an individual basis.

Butch Arnold, CEO of 3rd Rock, said their grid is seeing more traffic since they opened HG and some visitors have registered accounts with us. I told Butch I see your traffic is up some and he replied, "it is indeed.. almost doubled since October." The grid uses partial Hypergrid which blocks most content leaving the grid other than note cards and landmarks. Anything can be brought in of course so that includes deliveries from Kitely Market but Butch told me they are still working on their system.

ZanGrid has the benefit of seeing the success 3rd Rock is making of its entry into connected worlds of Hypergrid and, no doubt, they will look closely at their achievements. In any event, I am certain ZanGrid will see a boost in visitor traffic.

Opensim Virtual Crowdfund Meeting...
 
OV will be holding a meeting for the pledge makers to discuss the current Crowdfunding project to have llLookAt and llMoveTo fixed. 3rd Rock Grid  was chosen by me to hold the first meeting and Butch Arnold said he was happy to offer a venue and any help they can give. I'm drawing up a policy (or charter) to present to the pledge makers which sets out how we will operate the fund. 

Fred Beckhusen’s flying bee. (Image courtesy Fred Beckhusen.)

Everyone is welcome to attend the meeting though but the first part will not be open for general discussion. I want to make sure the pledge makers have their say and get to decide how we proceed. Once that is out of the way then I'll invite the audience to ask questions and engage each other in debate if they wish to.

The meeting is scheduled to start at 9 PM which is 8 pm UK, 3 PM EST and noon PST on Sunday 1st February 2015.

The pledge makers who have confirmed by email are as follows...


Talla Adam (Kitely Grid) $200
Shin Ingen (Ingen Lab Grid) $200
Fred Beckhusen (Outworldz Grid) $500
Selby Evans (Virtualoutworlding blog) $500
Geir Nøklebye (Xmir Grid) $50
Butch Arnold (3rd Rock Grid) $100
Michael Sietz (Digital Worlds Group LLC) $100
Alex Ferraris (Avi-Labs Grid) $100

That makes a total so far of $1750 confirmed pledges and the target is $2000.

Update (2nd Feb 2015): Crowdfund Meeting at 3rd Rock grid 

The meeting at 3rd Rock grid was fruitful and went well. Turnout was about 20 from other grids including all but one of the Pledge makers. They all teleported in successfully via Hypergrid. Apart from the loss of some attachments like hair everything seemed normal and relatively lag free. There is a log of the meeting posted here on it's own page together with a video from Fred Beckhusen illustrating the issues the Crowdfund is being raised to try and address. Opensim United also posted the log and pictures. 

Michael Sietz (Digital Worlds Group LLC) has also raised his pledge to $350 bringing the fund up to the target sum of $2000. I regret no more pledges can be accepted now.

Follow-up news on the Crowdfunding progress will be posted to the Crowdfund-log page on this site so please stay tuned!

 Closed Grids & Hypergrid traffic neck & neck but every way is up!
 
Ever since Maria Korolov published last month's traffic metrics on Hypergrid Business and declared that the Hypergrid worlds now were leading in total visitor traffic I have been watching our own Grid Search metrics closely. Our search engine updates all the metrics twice a week presently and displays a breakdown of which part of the Metaverse is getting the most traffic. Last month, according to HB, the combined closed grids figure was down below that for the combined Hypergrid worlds. But according to Grid Search, which tracks the most active grids, the none-Hypergrid worlds are still leading. In fact I have noticed a recent surge in Inworldz traffic which is helping to keep the none-HG grids up above the enabled grids.

The value of these metrics is questionable however and it has been pointed out that the closed grids display only unique logins while the open grids display both unique logins and Hypergrid visits which skew the figures. What they say is the same person might login at their own grid then visit other grids via Hypergrid thus pushing up the numbers if they get around a lot of them. On the other hand, people say the closed grid owners create large numbers of alternative name accounts and log them in just once a month which also skews their figures too. Other's just ignore all this and look at the trend which is generally positive in any event.

But today's figures were amazingly close regardless. They are as follows...
Total Active Grids: 188

Distributed Regions: 34879
Registered Users: 415096
Monthly Active Traffic: 24802
Est' Daily Peak Traffic: 886
Hypergrid Traffic: 12400
Closed Grid Traffic: 12402

You can take these numbers any way you like but they are drawn from the grid splash pages either manually or by our scraper program. incidentally, I recently made some code improvements so I could start to display individual regions of interest too and I will be looking at the code again with a view to increasing the number of splash pages the scraper can read so we can run it daily. Not only will that save me a lot of work it should be possible to show which grids are online or not.


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Crowdfunding Opensim Development & Metaverse News!

There have been many calls to crowdfund Opensim features the community would like to see implemented but no concrete proposals to date have been made. Crowdfunding is not new and has proved very effective in getting new projects and ideas developed. Oculus Rift came into existence due initially to Crowdfunding. The Mesh Deformer was also supported by Second Life merchants in a Crowdfunding call and, while Linden Lab rejected it, the open Metaverse Inworldz grid took it up and had it developed for their residents but also donated the code as a feature of Opensim Viewers.

A few days ago J.Duke posted a topic to OV asking when we would get Havok physics because he wanted to bring his articulated truck trail system to the open grids (see link: http://bit.ly/1DyaX15 ) and, of course, Opensim is not going to get the Havok system because it's too expensive. However, Fred Beckhusen, the well known scripter in both SL and OS, said it's not the physics we need to change but llLookAt and llMoveTo are broken in Opensim code and need fixing if we are to see improvements in vehicle function of the kind J. Duke is looking for.

I felt this called for a Crowdfunding solution to get Dev's interested in working on it so today I'm making a personal pledge of $200 ( and I might donate more if the the pledges come in) to launch the campaign to raise a bounty. Fred Beckhusen has also said he is willing to help fund this so lets get it started. Is our community committed enough to help raise this bounty? What about those who make money running a business on the Opensim platform code, the commercial grid owners and Hosting companies,  will they pledge money and earn community kudos?

Initially, I think we might set a target of $2000 which, if mostly funded, can be claimed by any developer, or dev's, that successfully solve the problems and submit effective code to the core Opensim team. I will keep the community informed both here and at OV.

How will we do this?

Keeping it simple. We can use the comments here or at G+ Opensim Virtual to discuss the project and make a pledge if anyone want to. Please don't pledge what you might not honor and not less than $10. Nothing will be collected by me but once we have the working code in Opensim and there are no issues (Members will test it for sure) then I will declare the bounty available to whoever is recognized as responsible for the code contribution. Those who made pledges will then be asked to send their donation to the named bounty claimant - probably through Paypal so the claimant will need to have an active account and let us know they have received the money. There maybe a better way to do this so I'm open to suggestions.

So, there you have it. Money will be pledged and put on the table. If any Opensim developer is reading this wants to email me and make me aware privately of their interest then you can reach me at talla0adam|AT|gmail.com

Aviworlds Re-launched & Alex strikes back with Avi-Labs
The dramas surrounding the "bouncing" grid, Aviworlds might have settled down some now as Mike Hart has finally rested control from Alex Ferraris and re-launched it but not without Alex announcing the launch of yet another grid, Avi-Labs aimed mainly at his old following in the Brazilian community. Aviworlds, however, is making a strong pitch for the Brazilians by including greeters at their welcome region that speak the language.

Presently, Alex Ferraris is not a member of OV having departed recently. Actually, he has been in and out of OV almost as often as he has opened and closed Aviworlds when he still owned it. Anyway, I have been urged not to let Alex back because people are saying he just gets embroiled in dramas which reflect badly on the Open Metaverse community in general. This does mean Avi-Labs may not be promoted at OV but I have now let Aviworlds be promoted here since the ownership issue appear to be settled. Alex Ferraris says about Avi-Labs, "steaming ahead for a place in the top ten most popular grids in the metaverse." It will be interesting to see how these rival grids measure up to each other in the traffic metrics.
 
Breaking News: Zandramas Grid to change name to Zangrid
Making the announcement at their new G+ community ZanGrid, Suz Blessed posted  "Soon Zandramas will be ZanGrid :)  Same grid  just a different name, That is all :)". ZanGrid (Zandramas) is a grid people can join on invite and referral only. 

Finding Grids, Venues, Shopping and getting traffic
Opensim Virtual has its own Search Engine capable of finding most known grids. See the Metaverse link above for a demonstration of it in action on this blog. The Search can also be used in an Opensim Viewer such as Kokua to find and display the login splash pages of various grids. It may be used in-world too by opening a browser window in the viewer and searching for regions to visit. The Login link may also open a Landmark in-world which you can click to teleport or you can copy and paste HG addresses directly into the world map and TP from there. It works really well in Singularity but due to the V1 nature of that viewer it tends to open a web browser on your desktop which it shouldn't. The latest Firestorm viewer is currently broken too for opening landmarks and splash pages, so testing has proved. To use the engine in world call the address: http://www.x-retro-x.com/search.php

 

Using Grid Search is easy. Just select a category and enter a search term and the engine will display a selection of grids and regions matching the search criteria. The displayed items also show the current traffic data and a popup preview with a brief description of the grid. If a grid is open to Hypergrid then the address is shown too for copy & paste.

Gird owners who don't see their grid in Search can ask for it to be added by sending an email to talla0adam|AT|gmail.com. Please note that the engine is designed to rate grids according to their traffic level so that busy worlds appear at the top of the display results. This means that grids which don't display traffic data on their splash pages will always be low in results and may not appear at all if they are off-line too much.

Finally, I do aim to do more work on our search engine so it can more easily find what users are looking for but it works well enough even now.


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