With whom are you going to have your Twitter icon do battle? Let us know.

If you’re unfamiliar with Dot War, it is a Flash-based strategy that “transforms the icon of your Twitter account into a maximum of 4,608 small soldiers and pit them against others”, according to the help section of the game.

The way Dot War works is the various colors within your icon represent different types of soldiers and each feature four battle parameters: Speed, Stamina, Attack and Range. In order for your icon to defeat another you must take down your opponent’s three crystals within the given time.

I’ve included some screenshots below of my Twitter icon doing battle against Puff Daddy… PDiddy… Diddy.

"Mo Money Mo Problems" was right apparently.

So, how did your Twitter icon do in battle? Let us know the result.

Google Preps Postini For Business World

Google plans to push Postini, the email security firm they purchased, with business customers. They have offered existing Postini customers free use of Google Apps Premier Edition through June 2008, according to an AP report.

Google wants businesses to sign on with its Google Apps service. Fifty dollars annually per user gives them Google Docs and Gmail with a level of support; more importantly, Google does all of the application maintenance and upkeep, including spam filtering.

Email and the sensitivity of its content makes businesses wary of using an email service that isn’t under its direct control. Postini’s customers have used that product to protect existing mail servers.

Google began promoting Postini’s features, as incorporated into Google Apps. Postini enabled Google to offer security and compliance features for mail, including the ability to recover deleted emails on a 90-day rolling basis.

As an added incentive, Google will boost the storage capacity of Gmail for its Apps clients from 10GB to 25GB, according to AP. Along with the Postini security features, Google has a much stronger pitch to offer potential business clients.

It’s still not a Microsoft killer; that’s up to the market to decide. But Google Apps is reaching a level of maturity where it can be reasonably considered. It isn’t just the applications and email features a business would receive, but the ability to lower demands on internal tech staff for application and email support.

Some businesses will find that last part a compelling one, and we’re sure Google will make it a point of discussion during its pitch to the business market.

Avatar Seeks Semantic Search

While a lot of attention has been heaped upon Powerset and its almost-here natural language search, IBM has been working on a similar technology that may or may not be as close to public debut.

IBM calls their effort Avatar Semantic Search. Right now it doesn’t even have the nice minimalist home page Powerset has for early peek signups, but since everyone’s done reading ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’, a little text to read is a good thing.

“Ongoing research in Avatar is at the cusp of a number of disciplines ranging from search and information retrieval to machine learning, information extraction, and probabilistic databases,” IBM announced on the project’s page.

We’ve looked at earlier IBM efforts to pull information out of unstructured resources. Their UIMA developments now occupy a place in the freely available IBM Omnifind Yahoo Edition enterprise search product, for example.

But UIMA is so 2005. While Powerset has drawn upon research performed by the Palo Alto Research Center, aka PARC, IBM reached out to the academic community to complement Avatar’s internal team.

They have approached the semantic search issue in three ways. Developing an information extraction system will allow Avatar to plunge into mounds of raw text, and emerge with structured data based on rules-based annotators.

IBM claimed this extraction system will permit unsophisticated users to build an annotator with Avatar and pull out the desired information from email, web pages, business reports, etc.

Through semantic search, the researchers think they can interpret queries people make, and model the real intent behind a query.

The real challenge comes from an effort they refer to as managing uncertainty and probabilistic databases. They’ve stepped deeply into theory here, well beyond any help Douglas Adams can provide for me.

IBM built momentum with UIMA starting well before I’d interviewed Marc Andrews about it in December 2005. It led to the co-branded, freely available Omnifind product I mentioned earlier, and I have to think Avatar may be on a similar track today.

Yahoo’s effervescent intern and blogger Doreen Bloch wrote about the Mashup 2007 at Yahoo’s official blog. Some sessions, like those led by people like MIT professor Henry Jenkins and blogger danah boyd, discussed teen culture on the Net.

Others focused on what teen peers have accomplished. A quartet of young entrepreneurs discussed their experiences in building online businesses. Teens aren’t the end of Yahoo’s or the marketing world’s interest. Next up in September: Tween Mashup 2007.

Social networking, avatar-driven Doppelganger creates instant messaging environments like The Lounge. To build awareness of what the privately held company can do, they called upon their users to help.

That led to a YouTube video featuring the avatars of members jamming in the environment. It also noted in passing the marketing potential for selling virtual outfits to wear in the world.

Anyone who can tear themselves away from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this weekend may want to read some earlier, prescient mentions of avatars and virtual clothing in William Gibson’s ‘Idoru’ or Neal Stephenson’s ‘Snow Crash’. Each predates places like The Lounge, not to mention Facebook, MySpace, and in the case of Stephenson, the World Wide Web.

It’s interesting for someone like me to see how science fiction has become fact in a lot of ways, both in terms of the implementation of environments, and the way marketing has followed them closely. How much more closely they meld, and the discussions surrounding whether they should or not, will be the next thing to watch.

Just try to read this without feeling like you’re sitting in the back of the classroom, snickering with your buddies at the slightest hint of double entendre – you know, she said jacket, heh heh.

It’s bad enough this story involves virtual sex and real fake money, but add in that "Stroker" is suing an imaginary nemesis in a real court of law and you’re head might explode.

Okay, so Stroker Serpentine’s (what, Balls McFly  already taken?) nemesis isn’t really imaginary. He’s an avatar until Serpentine (real name Kevin Alderman) figures out who the flesh-and-blood version of Volkov Catteneo is.

Catteneo, according to Serpentine, is a pirate who’s been selling knockoffs of his company’s virtual sex beds. The beds are sold in SecondLife, to SecondLifers with no real FirstLife (that’s a joke, a cheap one, please no hateful comments or emails accusing me of stereotyping virtual perverts, and/or the kind of perverts they are in real life).

Each SexGen bed sells for L$12,000 (US$45.11) – yes, there is a currency rate, and yes, Reuters provided the conversion, presumably with a straight face.

Reuters also provides a link to the PDF of Serpentine’s complaint, spelled out in 79 very real and mind-bending pages.

After Reuters conducted a virtual interview with Catteneo, Wagner James Au of GigaOm chatted with Stroker for more details on the case.  

• It’s highly targeted
• It’s immediate
• It’s low cost and often free

The downside is because of it’s interactive nature (which contributes to it’s virality), spam marketers will always try to flood you, and drown out your message with their spam.

This includes, but is not limited to:

• Posting irrelevant images (usually a scantily-clad female) in their avatars [see: How Your Social Network Avatar Can Make Or Break Your Internet Marketing Efforts]
• Comment spam: “I like your site, come visit me at (website address)”
• Being generally obnoxious (use rules of social etiquette to figure this one out)

On social community sites like MyBlogLog, Eric and his team have instituted several measure like: limiting personal messages to 20 a day (with an innovative reciprocal message feature in place) , and eliminating animated GIF avatars in favor of single (static) image ones.

But that still doesn’t quite solve the problem of ‘widget spam’ where people with link baiting avatars feature on your sidebar widget that appears on the right of this blog.

Fortunately, MyBlogLog community manager Robyn Tippins informed me that MyBlogLog includes features to block both visitors to your site, and mask your presence on a sidebar widget with the ‘cloak of invisibility’ feature (the name I’ve given to it).

Initially I had asked Robyn about killing the community visitors altogether. (which might seem extreme, until you consider that it creates a better user experience for your visitors)

Robyn responded:

If it’s on the [sidebar] widget you can hover over then and click the red x.

At this point there’s no way to kill visitors to your community page (but you can kill community members, I think).

I’m annoyed too by those avs. We are killing animated gifs this week, but the sexy graphics are a pet peeve of mine too (and I’m hard to offend).

—

Here’s how you’d delete visitors (say if I wanted to remove my buddy Ryan Chua permanently from my sidebar widget:

And similarly if I wanted to ‘mask’ my presence on another blog:

Let me clear the air, I am personally not offended by these images, but if they affect the blog readers user experience, I will step in and moderate the blog.

I’ve gone one step further and made the recommendation that MyBlogLog could include a classification system that is moderated from a central node at MyBlogLog. Avatars could be flagged with a “G” or “R” rating like movies are. Or maybe it’d be easier to setup a NSFW (not suitable for work) rating (I’ve been told nude images have been used for some avatars).

True, it would reduce some traffic in the short term, but when you look at how this increases the longevity of the social networks (some of which have degenerated more into ’spam networks’), it also makes the network a more legitimate and credible medium in the long term.

Comments

Not just any avatars, dear reader. We’re talking star powered avatars, based on reality, or at least a reality show. They present a pleasant escape, to places where warm sunshine and non-stop parties take place, a lot like they do on TV shows.

Our show in question appears on MTV. “The Hills” second season is underway, and they have recently launched a virtual version of it called “Virtual Hills”.

Like last September’s efforts that created Virtual Laguna Beach, Makena Technologies’ There.com has assisted with development of the newest online spinoff.

“MTV Networks is the first to recognize the potential for using social virtual worlds to enhance the viewer experience and build a stronger bond with the audience,” said Michael Wilson, CEO of Makena.

That bond comes inside the 3D social virtual world crafted for MTV’s shows. Just as “The Hills” has been developed out of “Laguna Beach” by following one of its characters to L.A., fans can follow along from their web browsers.

This is where the avatars come into play (hooray!) Now that “Virtual Hills” has debuted, people can do in virtual reality all of the meeting and socializing they like. Stars from the show will be represented in the online world, as MTV and There.com jointly noted:

As online experiences go, “Virtual Hills” and its older sibling are steps toward star interaction that just don’t happen for the typical viewer. Being part of the experience means joining and registering an avatar to represent oneself in the world.

Avatars have to be outfitted, and that means buying clothes. As in other online games, a virtual currency called VMTV Dollars can be purchased and used for those in-game shopping sprees. No one wants to show up for the party of the year in last year’s avatar garb or ride.

It’s all about living the image online.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Here’s one that’s focused on Dutch and French speakers – Taatu, based in Belgium.

It’s not new, having launched in Belgium and The Netherlands in 2005.

But I’ve noticed a number of recent media articles and blog posts about it including a feature in Le Journal du Net on December 22 that says Taatu is a European alternative to Second Life.

The article (in French) says Taatu launched in France in that week:

… Il est officiellement ouvert en France depuis cette semaine.

As Taatu is squarely targeting the 12-25 age group, I wouldn’t say it’s an alternative to Second Life (you have to be at least 18 to join SL). A European alternative to Teen Second Life, perhaps, aimed at 13 to 17 year olds.

What about Habbo Hotel, another European virtual environment (out of Finland) that’s aimed at kids? That seems a more likely comparison for Taatu. With both of these, the appearance of the environment, the avatar characteristics and other aspects of the look-and-feel are similar, much more so than the far more realistic Second Life environment.

Either way, it’s interesting seeing such virtual, er, real developments. And check out Taatu’s video presentation – very cool with terrific music.

(Via Le labo de Max)

Something else interesting – a promotional campaign to recruit members into Taatu. Other virtual communities have refer-a-friend promotions, but I’ve not seen one like this before.

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.