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.
You have IMs set to go to email, right? It's about the only way people can reliably get in touch with you with online statuses unavailable (Unless you've got the Earthlink anti-spam filter, or some other callback-and-confirm anti-spam system running, in which case you just can't get them at all apparently).
This is the third in our 'Adjusting to a New World' series of articles for beginners - although some intermediate and advanced Second Lifers are also finding little tidbits that they didn't know in them. Last time, 
