Fellow avatars, having fun inside of Second Life?  How would you like to take your Avatar outside of Second Life and out into Cyberspace.  By Cyberspace I mean the world of Email, Web Pages, and other exciting things on the Internet not just Second Life.  Why would you want to do this?  A couple of reasons, privacy, expanding your avatar’s horizons and perhaps having a bit more fun with your avatar.  Creating an identity for your avatar 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.  We need to do that because your browser is storing a lot of bits and pieces that identify you rather than your avatar (cookies).

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, you might use a similarly created Yahoo! Mail account and have them cross authenticate each other.  Yahoo! also have some other interesting web features we might cover next time.

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 all of your wonderful Second Life pictures.
• 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. This makes the web traffic secure.

LifeHacker has a number of Google enhancements, such as Better Gmail, Better GReader, and Better Gcal.

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.  You can also use the online storage, box.net.  They will give you 1GB of storage for free.

One piece of troubleshooting advice, if you have trouble installing a Firefox 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 have the cache on long term. The reason it is set to 0, is that the flash drive is slow and it will wear out the flash drive eventually.

Lastly for the Google tools, 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.

Where to run all of these toys.  You can run them in a separate web browser, such as the Portables Apps one.  Or you can get fancier.  GoPC.net offers a free Linux virtual desktop you could run most, if not all of the applications talked about here.  You install a small client on your PC, and then communicate to your desktop (which is in Australia) via the Internet.  Another most exotic, and most useful way to go is create an entire virtual machine to run your virtual identity.  VMware is a product you can install on your PC that will allow you to run another “computer” within it.  You could run Windows, Linux, or whatever you wish.  VMware Player and VMware Server are free products from VMware and you can download premade virtual machines from their site to play with immediately.  They also have a similar product for the Mac.  The VMware route will require a high performance machine if you plan on running Second Life at the same time - 2GB or more of RAM.

If you do start a Second Life blog, IM myself or Zoe Connolly in Second Life if you would like to join the SL Blogger group.  We have monthly parties and socialize both in world and to some degree in our blogs.

There you are. Your avatar can now have a life of it’s own in cyberspace.  Next time we will talk about more online resources for you and your avatar.

-Veyron Supercharge