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With the explosion of social networks and services that let you share your activities with the world via RSS feeds, it was necessary to build a service that could integrate all these disparate. These services included Flickr-to share your photos, Twitter-to share your updates, dopplr-to share where you are at the moment, Your Blog’s RSS Feed- to let the world know what you are saying and other streams like StumbleUpon, Youtube, Facebook feeds and so on.
FriendFeed was the first to recognize this need and came up with a life streaming service that aimed to aggregate all this information and in turn build a new layer on top of these services. It is yet to be seen if FriendFeed is able to lessen the immense noise that is created by updating all these services or if it would go down the drain creating excess noise of its own. But FriendFeed is now slowly adding features that are making it more useful over time. One such example is the launch of FriendFeed rooms.
With that said, a similar thing is happening in the Virtual Worlds arena. According to VentureBeat, investors put $184 million in 23 virtual worlds in the first quarter of 2008. Even Google could not resist the temptation of coming up with a virtual world of its own. With so much investment and interest in the segment, its all but natural to predict that these players would do nothing less than make the virtual worlds arena fragmented. This would result in people getting stuck in a virtual world of their own with friends on some other distant platforms.
The state of virtual worlds naturally demanded the need for a FriendFeed for virtual worlds. This is exactly what Myrl wants to be. Myrl is a web based social gateway that is designed to make the experience of using virtual worlds easy and fun once again. Myrl is aiming to do this by bringing the people across different virtual worlds to come together and talk to each other. In a nutshell, it wants to eliminate borders of lock-in in our virtual worlds so residents of different virtual worlds could make friends with one another.
Myrl allows people to connect their various accounts and interact with people who are not present on their virtual world. Myrl members could than share their virtual life on the web by creating their avatar profile and post content such as popular places, events, news and images that every user can vote on (or Myrl) to make them more visible for the rest of the community.
Currently Myrl does not support sign up to different virtual worlds right from within Myrl, however this is in works. Myrl is not a virtual world in its own right but rather a glue that connects different isolated islands.
According to Francesco D’Orazio founder and CEO of Myrl:
The virtual scene is getting really crowded and users need a tool that helps them reduce and manage this complexity. We are now supporting 19 virtual worlds and we are going to integrate more platforms by the end of the year. The release of the Social Gateway for Virtual Worlds is the first step of a long roadmap. The way we use virtual worlds is changing, and we intend to support and foster this change.
