Your avatar gets a phone number.

According to Joe Linden, we may soon see phone numbers for our avatars. Can't make it into Second Life to talk to a friend? Call up her avatar from your cell!

This topic was mentioned briefly by Joe Linden in a live GridTalk interview on December 4th, 2007 and hinted at in an article found here.

However, this chan was able to get an exclusive interview with Joe Linden (IRL Joe Miller, VP of Platform and Technology Development) about an hour ago and found out more about it.

This technology seems to be in the testing phase at group chat level right now, and is being tested by the PSTN Bridge 1 group, but it may soon be available for any group chats. This opens up great possibilities for business conference calls and another step toward bringing the world closer together. Manage your transcontinental content creation team on the go, or allow business clients without time or access to SL to address your team directly. Script an object to email your phone a customer's or client's digits so you can call them immediately while you are traveling. The possibilities make me a little excited.

When asked about lulzkilling security (such as changing our numbers) to protect lolcows curb griefing, Joe added, "We're looking at adding pins for that purpose." Curious chan is curious. I further pressed the issue of more dynamic security and asked him if we'd be able to change our pins, to which he replied that it is "not fully determined quite yet."

Yeah...I'm going to take that as a likely "yes" based on common sense.

I also inquired if there are plans to connect the technology to land audio feeds such as in the event of someone wanting to address a parcel and he replied, "Not yet. Group or p2p calls only at the moment."

With PSTN integration, video conferencing can't be far behind can it?

"Nothing in detail on video conferencing I can speak about, but the work on generalized web content (including Flash) on a prim gets us closer."

Nothing he can speak about. /wink

Win.

Copypasta from PSTN Bridge 1 info:
For those interested in technicalities, the caller(s) are transcoded from an 8KHz sample rate to 32KHz on the fly.

Pic related.