An amusing little thing to do is Ego Surfing. With the unusual names that most of us avatars have, this is a pretty easy thing to do. For example, try a search on Google for “October Hush”. You’re pretty much guaranteed to find only hits for the lovely Miss Hush. It’s interesting to see where you’re name is coming up in other places; sometimes places you would be surprised.

Google has a feature called Google Alerts that you can setup to send you an email when it finds a search term or terms you specify. So - say I want to stalk the lovely Miss Hush’s activity on the Internet, I can setup Google to do most of the work for me….

-Veyron

Last post I mentioned about how to give your avatar an email address with LindenPost.com. To take it another, logical step forward, you can give your avatar it’s own identity in cyberspace, separate from your own. This has a number of advantages. You get to keep your identity private, you get a semi-custom or custom email address and you can keep things separate. This is a step-by-step guide to how to do it.

We are going to leverage the wonderful Internet system we know as Google. We are going to use it as our operating system. But before we do that, we need to make sure your identity is separate from your avatar’s identity. The easiest way to do that is to run a different web browser than you run now.

This part is Windows centric, but the gist of it will work on any computer. If you regularly use Internet Explorer, the easiest thing to do is download and install Firefox. Firefox is going to have all the tools we need to use the Google Operating System anyway, so you’ll need it. Already use Firefox? You can’t really have two installations of Firefox easily. Here’s another solution, Portable Firefox from PortableApps.com. Portable Apps is a great set of free tools you can download that will run from anywhere. Usually installed from a removable USB drive. You can then take all of the software tools you might need anywhere you go. I put a USB drive right on my keychain and leave it in my purse. If you don’t have or don’t want to install Firefox on a USB drive, I believe you can install it locally on your hard drive. Another tool I find very useful is KeePass to manage passwords.

Now that you have different Firefox installed that has a separate identity from your own, we can go create your avatar’s identity. First step, go to Gmail and create an account. Let me know if you need an invite, you shouldn’t as Gmail is out of beta. If you need an email account to verify Gmail with, the LindenPost.com account would be a good choice, as your avatar created it. Gmail can also pull the LindenPost email via POP3.

Now you have a Google identity. From this point we can build up on this. Here are some Google add ons that are useful to add:

• Personalized home page is useful.
• Google Reader is very useful for reading blogs. I use it all the time.
• Google Notebook for storing notes and other bits you might come across.
• Google Docs and Spreadsheets for doing documents related to just your avatar.
• Google Calendar to keep track of those important dates for your avatar.
• Google Home Page, if you want your avatar to have it’s own home web page.
• Picasa Web Albums, 1GB of images to store online and serve up.
• And of course, Blogger, to blog for your avatar.

Next, we can integrate some tools with Firefox and Google. The Google Toolbar is a really good add-on for Firefox. If you’re signed in, it can tell you if you have Google Email, new posts in Google Reader, get at your Google Docs, make posts to Blogger, and it can store your book marks in Google History. Google History is sort of good/bad. It can track your history do a customized search and store your book marks, etc. It’s an avatar’s life, so it’s mostly harmless and fairly useful.

Another useful Firefox add-on is CustomizeGoogle. It makes a large number of improvements to the Google experience through Firefox. A couple of good changes to make is change to use https over http for a few of the Google services.

A add-on from LifeHacker is the Better Gmail extension. It adds a large number of tweaks and upgrades to Gmail. This extension might break at some point when Google makes changes to Gmail, but it should get updated as Google makes those changes.

A really useful add-on is Gspace. It makes your Gmail account a portable storage device you can use through Firefox. Gmail gives you over 2GB of storage, and Gspace lets you use it for storing files.

A more complicated upgrade is to Google Reader is the Google Reader Theme. It has a fair number of extensions to install and upgrade, but it makes the Reader look nicer.

One piece of troubleshooting advice, if you have trouble installing an extension with an error code, go in to Portable Firefox and increase the amount of cache used from 0 to some number like 16. Restart Firefox. Install the extension. Restart again, and then change it back to 0, restart and clear the cache. If you have Firefox on a flash drive, you do not want Firefox to cache to it. The reason it is set to 0, is that the flash drive is slow and it will wear out the flash drive eventually.

Lastly, you can add Google Talk. If you use Google Talk on your own Google account, you can run another copy in Firefox under a different Google ID. Go to the Google Talk page and launch it within the web browser.

There you are. Your avatar can now have a life of it’s own in cyberspace.

-Veyron