Here's an interesting oddity. If you're using the Steam Community Beta, you may have noticed that it allows you to add external programs to the games list. I thought I'd add in Second Life and a couple of my non-Steam-based diversions.

Steam works quite neatly as a launcher for all of that sort of thing. The interesting thing is the steam community overlay, which operates in virtually everything you run using Shift-Tab, like you would to bring the overlay up in regular Steam titles. Here it is running in Second Life:

Now that was an unexpected feature. Access to your friends list, IMs, voice-chat, and all that, like it would from any other Steam game.

Now... why can't I get my viewer updated via Steam, so I don't have to worry about downloading updates, hmm? Meh. It probably costs rather more to get your stuff in there than people want to pay.