Tech Lunch

There seems to be a steady trickle of whizzy little apps that manage one’s public persona in Web 2.0 applications. I recently noted the MoodBlast tool, but the latest, Second Friends, allows you to import your Second Life avatar details into your Facebook profile and comes courtesy of EduServe’s Andy Powell (via his Second Life alter ego Art Fossett).

By creating an open Applications Programming Interface (API), Facebook is encouraging this kind of innovation on top of its core product. Andy Powell’s widget could be the first stage of a larger development where you can control your avatar in Second Life, from within Facebook.

This got me thinking. Increasingly a real person is represented online by a variety of virtual personae, aspects of which are filtered through different applications.

Somebody, somewhere, probably in a back bedroom, is building some kind of amalgamating, persona application that allows easy control of all these aspects from one handy desktop widget. This would be a true identity mash-up.