slstats.com - list of sims. possible API? need feedback

I put slstats.com together. It's sort of the result of a bunch of pieces of code that i had collected over the last few month. and was primarily driven by the issue that i couldn't find a reliable source of an exhaustive list of sims.

For example, today's new sims (or late last night) are: Baseball, Boulevard Mystique, Calla, De Designs, Dragon Estate, Dream City, Esperance, Farrah Island, For Sale Template, Games, Ketora, Kittyland 1, Laurel, Media Design, Middletown, Ohio University, Orientation Island Tg, Proto, Sheep Void, Silvermoon, Syd, Tenagra, and Theta.

At least I think they're new, unless it's possible to rename sims. You can browse the list of sims, too. And apparently private sims are listed as well -- when some of them are clicked on, they won't appear on the map. I'm not sure on how to programmatically identify sims as private yet (if anyone knows, please let me know).

All this is part of a larger plot, which i'm not ready to unveil just yet.

A side effect was the collection of user stats (see my sig), so there's something fun for everyone. well, anyone who wants to participate anyway.

Anyway, I'm wondering whether there's anyone else who needs a list of sims in an easily digestible format (such as CSV). LL keeps taking about Platform and

i'm also thinking about opening up the user stats for third party integration. I have an XML interface for it, but haven't made it public yet.

Any thoughts?

cool! hope you get a good user base so the stats can grow.

Huh --- that's funny - same service as I launched WITH the same name. Couldn't you at least have given it a different name? I noticed you purchased the URL a week or two ago...

You probably also didn't notice that he purchased slprofile.com and has redirected it to slbuzz.com.

Well, my thoughts were that this sort of stats could be very useful and interesting. I grabbed the script so I could lend my support. But I will be withdrawing that support now. Hopefully some day someone else will try this as the information gathered could be interesting. Nice idea, underhanded implementation.

The problem that we're running into is that Second Life, as a platform, currently has a very small community which, however, includes many technically apt users and a good number of talented developers. The openness of Second Life and the direction that Linden Lab is taking with it also allows for the implementation of many new ideas and existing ideas, and especially popular ones.

How many "sites like MySQL specifically for Second Life" are out there? A good number. When I started work on SLBuzz.com, the only other site I knew of was sl.me.com, which (my apologies to the creators) seemed like a cookie-cutter, prefab-purchased, configured and deployed web site at the time. So I figured there's room for competition. When development was already under way, Yo Brewster announced slprofiles. And when Jazmina Firefly crashed Yo Brewster's slprofiles thread, smugly announcing that sl.me.com was there first, Yo's argument for slprofiles was about the same; Development had already begun, and besides, there's nothing wrong with competition.

Now look at the "market". There's sl.me, slprofiles, slbuzz, secondlifenetwork, myslspace (which i don't think has been formally announced yet) and many more similar domain names that have been registered. I don't think any of these sites should or can claim any originality on the matter, but they all have their strong points that make them unique. I can't speak for the other sites, but SLBuzz.com, I believe, is the only site that allows you to search for other members by distance; enter a zipcode, the radius in miles, and see who from that area might be interested in, say, a real life meeting.

With SLStats it was the same situation. I've developed a good number of web properties in the past, some catering to gamers, others for businesses, but statistics are something that interests everyone. And the term SLStats just comes naturally. Imagine my disappointment when Yo announced his version of SLStats, roughly 2 days before I was ready to announce the same thing publically; it had been in development as part of SLBuzz before his announcement (I can pull the exact date and time from the Subversion logs).

The dilemma was apparent; both tools named the same thing, accomplishing roughly the same thing using different means (external software vs attachment+script). I decided to retool SLStats into its own standalone version so people who aren't interested in SLBuzz or other similar sites can still use slstats. You can actually tell because my numbers on the standalone slstats.com site don't match the numbers in my forum signature below. And that's because some of the statistics were collected before slstats was a separate entity.

I'm just trying to clarify what's going on here, before unnecessary accusations and rumours take off. I do believe that there will be situations where applications, websites and especially Second Life objects and scripts with similar feature sets will collide and the people involved who are (rightfully so) very passionate about their creations will potentially start holy wars on what's better or who was there first and whatever else can be used as argument, but that's probably just part of the game as long as it doesn't get too out of hand.

That said, I enjoy dabbling with the many different aspects of Second Life and believe there will be as much competition as there will be collaboration among the developers with ideas that are overlapping and projects that may become so huge they'll outgrow a single developer, be it a person or a small company. I respect what Yo Brewster has put together and intend no harm. Sites with the scope of slprofiles definitely don't write themselves and aren't exactly created over night.

I love Second Life for the platform that it is trying to, and for the platform that it almost is.

Okay sure, you developed a stats thing for SL, that's fine. Explain why you reg'd SLProfile.com and have it redirecting to SLBuzz.com?

I sent Yo a PM about it, here an excerpt:



I'd call him, but I don't have his phone number. But I hope that clears it up. As I said before (did I say that before?), no harm intended.

I will be very honest with you Mark, the ONLY thing that bothered me was that you named your service EXCATELY the same as mine. SL Stats, which you registered just a week or so ago. Couldn't you at least have called it SLStatistics, SLTraffic, MySLTraffic, ... or something??? Lol - I can tell you right now that I've really learned my lesson here. Besides that, good luck with your service.

http://www.slprofiles.com/slstats.asp

Yo

Tsk tsk. You're all evil, evil! *I* have been using the name SLStats for well over a year now. How dare you all think you can go and pick such obivious names with no thought as to who really originated the name.

<sarcasm=off> SLStats is a very common name, and probably would be the first choice of anyone offering just a service. Personally I wont be fretting it, as I'll come up with a unique name if/when the time comes to go live with my own service.


- Newfie

Mark,

I could really use a listing (dynamic or not) of the different Sims. I run http://www.second411.com and have a fair amount of users typing in what I believe to be Sim names trying to find them and would love to be able to provide them a one shot link to where they need to go.

Please contact me in world (Hal9k Andalso) or you can email me at [email]hal9k@second411.com[/email].

Thanks!

Hey Hal9k,

I just got your email. I put up a list of sims here: http://slstats.com/sims.csv. It should be complete as of today, but it is also constantly changing. They're adding (and renaming, it seems) sims all the time. I'll send more details by email.

None. I think someone needs to take a break from coding. The stats are cool though. How do I get the banner thing you have in your sig?

hah, interesting nobody caught that yet. the stats banner is currently only available through SLBuzz, but I'm working on adding one to SLStats directly as well. Give me a day or two.

Wrestling Hulka needs to get a life!

I added stats for daily and weekly top residents. now you're even more popular. maybe the watch needs a little feature that reminds residents to please take a break, rest their eyes, and give others a chance to be in the top 10. Quit hogging everything.

The latest version of SLStats (v2.4) fixes a potential problem with running out of memory. yeah, oops.

Also, SLStats.com User Profiles have Birthdates (Rezdates?), and the Rating scores for Behavior / Appearance / Building listed.

Mark - how does the attachment communicate with the outside world?

email/httprequest/rpc?

Most concerned about httprequest - if I were to wear an attachment like this, I'm concerned about consuming some of my precious httprequest throttle time

Yes, it's using llHTTPRequest(). I really doubt that there's anything to worry about in terms of throttling. I've got all sorts of llHTTPRequest() objects running myself. A whole farm, in fact. I've tried pushing them to their limit and had to really "abuse" it to get throttled. I'd be really surprised if the watch impacts you at all. If it does, you must be running some serious HTTPRequest action.

In the unlikely event that it ever become a problem, I could make different communication methods available, but so far it's a non-issue. The SLStats web server giving in is a more likely event. I just made some optimizations that reduces the load. Redundancy to the rescue.

You can always just try it. It'll let you know if anything gets throttled.

I had added the ability to post blog entries from the SLStats watch (it's free and you can get one right here), a week ago, but last night I finally added RSS support. It's still kind of basic, but neat. Well -- you be the judge.

The other feature i've been working on should also be out later tonight. I've been saying that for a week now, but this time it should actually be true.

Just had a look at the stats

Hours online are fairly meaningless as one person is showing as online for 25 hours today and it is only 20:00 besides which the problem of a 24 hour day comes up, another shows at least 2 hours more than they have been online today.

With this error, what other game play techniques are there?

List of sims is useful, contacts interesting, if accurate, hours online, meaningless

Indeed, there are a few issues with the older v1.x watches. They had an issue with reporting rediculous times right as people would wear them for the first time. So far I've been going through the data and cleaning up the obvious problems. I've corrected most of the issues in the 2.x version of the script, and once I release v3, things should be looking pretty solid in that regard.

I haven't pushed people to update their scripts yet since v3 is just around the corner anyway. Until then I'm having fun hand-writing queries to fix up the mess.

Thanks Mark

I hope this one flies, as it is a useful tool and I can see other applications you may want to build in over time, that other game players will find useful.

All the best with it and I will keep wearing my script, though it isn't now in my watch. Don't wear one in RL and my avi was none to impressed either...

I think most people don't wear the actual watch. That's all fine by me since I only spent 10 minutes putting it together (and it shows). It was meant more as a container for the script than anything else, really.