More Ways To Connect To Each Other

Always the kind of people who like to innovate or at least try something new some of you may have noticed if your on Google+ that Social Events has used the feature to try out group invitations with Google Events for  Fadm Bixby's Birthday party, its a bit experimental to see how it goes and what can be done with it, but so far we can see possible benefits using the system with members of the GFC who are already in our G+ circle.

To explain how invites work abit more we've added a video below, maybe it could be a useful way of communicating info to specific divisions and members in the future.

You may remember we tested G+ last year and felt it had potential but needed a little maturing, we feel its pretty mature now and does offer many interesting features and find its actually much easier connecting with members than asking their email address or facebook accounts as its all linkes in with Google accounts which are used a lot for documentation in the GFC, it makes moving from one part of their system to another a lot more transparent and it all connects out of Gmail. Not to sound like a Google fanboy, it does make working on projects a lot easier as your not having to jump in and out of tones of unconnected systems.

Google hangout has been shown to be useful in sharing SL video footage using the shared screen option to other members who aren't in world at the time, there are potentials applications for that as well and we should be demoing some of this stuff here soon at some point.

Of course there is still Skype which is a popular and straightforward way of chatting with large numbers of people and is tried, tested and works well.

All of these adds to better ways of us communicating with each other in a faster more coherent way, lets see what we can make of it.

Skype rooms opened.

A few weeks ago we were experimenting with Google Hangout ( gh ) to look at creating an easy way of communicating with members. Gh's appeal meant joining a room could be done simply, its built into the system and GH extra includes the ability to add permanent names to rooms which made life easier. If anything though we found the system a little too open as the rooms were regarded as being totally public and a few more privacy  features we thought would have been helpful.

Richardjrn Weatherwax proposed we look at skype to achieve pretty much the same thing. Skype is already widely  used in the GFC which means transition would be easy. The way the system works is a new room is created with a name. The creator of the room is automatically made admin from there they have a handful of powers they can utilize to control aspects of how the room functions, including how to link to the room externally.

The link can be embedded in a webpage which sends you straight to the Skype room, this would help get rid of the procedure we have right now where people rush around looking in their contact lists for members to call on skype when attending events. With this system, the member has to do nothing more than simply clicking a link, A window will appear on your computer. Click on the launch button and you will be taken straight to the room if they have skype installed. A much quicker and efficient system. Unfortunately though it works well on webpages it doesn't from a prim in secondlife directly from a script.

In the long term this could be useful as members attending specific GFC events can if they want easily go into rooms linked to those event if they wanted to use that as a form of communication. Because there are abilities to password rooms, certain rooms can be controlled to be active when needed and offline when not,  giving more control over how individual rooms function.

It will be interesting to see how this concept progresses, but if you want to try contacting us click the skype link on the page sidebar of this site.

Info how to used skype commands can be found HERE
Below is a video how to join a room from a link.