It would seem that today’s viewer update contains, among other things, the ability to display a website on a prim.
It’s not exactly all I’d hoped for at this stage, but it is quite interesting that I can now display my website in-world (click for full size) :
(note that my website looks completely different in-world, as I’m using the Alex King WordPress Mobile Edition plugin on my site to make it easier to read in the Profile Web tab, and it detects Second Life® as a mobile browser)
It’s currently restricted to static pages, meaning that you can’t really click on anything at this point, and Flash and other plugins do not work, but it is encouraging to see concrete proof that Linden Lab® is working on integrating browsing functionality. This is great news, and I look forward to seeing the inventive and powerful uses that arise from this functionality over time.
Popularity: 41% [?]
Coming soon: Phishing on a prim!
Probably, yeah
And there are still huge privacy and security concerns, such as the fact that parcel media has traditionally been an extremely simple and reliable way to map any Second Life avatar to a real-world IP address
But there are still some potentially wonderful uses of the technology, and I think it is very much in Linden Lab’s best interests to enable the technology and make it as solid as possible. Their competitors are actually farther along this road than Second Life is, which is probably why we see such a feature-poor implementation at this stage : Give the public some indication of progress while they continue to work on it.