For communicators who are looking to understand more about Second Life, here’s an opportunity – the first meeting of Second Life Business Communicators will take place in Second Life on Tuesday 22 August at 4pm PDT (that’s 11pm GMT):
Please join us next Tuesday for our meeting – you don’t have to have joined the group in-world – it is open to anyone who is interested in just checking the group out. If you are curious about SL as a platform, medium, interface or environment for communications and business come and discuss its potential and challenges. Learn with us.
The meeting is organized by Linda Zimmer who I had the pleasure of meeting in SL a few months ago.
I wish I could be there but I’ll be on a plane back to Amsterdam at that time. No inflight wi-fi on KLM (and none anywhere soon) so no chance of connecting to join in from 40,000 feet. Therefore, looking forward to reading Linda’s post-event transcript.
Related: The Second Life Community Convention took place in San Francisco this past weekend. Bigger than Gnomedex, says Eric Rice. Not many communicators there, though, especially not Text 100 which surprised Jeremy Pepper. Plenty of other opinions about this event.
Well I finally bowed to peer pressure and decided to sign up for Second Life. After listening week on week to the FiR ‘second life’ podcast (!) I decided I really must give it a try. To be honest (outside of some very niche consumer based communication) I see too many shortcomings for this to be considered of real business value in the short to medium term. These are just my opinions…
1) I keep hearing about the use of SL as a meeting point for international teams (as a replacement for conference calls / business travel). I have trouble remembering everyone’s real names – let alone avatars too
2) It’s hard to check someone’s credentials – what’s to stop a competitor approaching me at a ‘hipcast’ conference and pumping me for information whilst posing as someone else / …or even just eavesdropping? Remember the old phrase….”on the internet nobody knows your a dog”
3) SL is inherently a consumer environment – I haven’t met anyone wearing a suit. Will traditional CEOs/VPs take this seriously when they see people walking around in skimpy clothes / with horns / wings et al?
4) If I connect at the office – I hear people asking why the corp. network has slowed down. SL is bandwidth hungry. Imagine 20 people connecting from the office at the same time. Most networks would grind to a halt.
I’m still making up my mind on SL….what benefit does this environment actually deliver over other forms? At the moment there seems to be too many compromises.
[…] One of the latest online wonders is Second Life. [See Neville Hobson, Gary Goldhammer, Jeremy Pepper and Text 100 to link but a few]. It’s a new online virtual environment where you can meet and interact with other virtual visitors – I realize that’s a very basic description but it’ll do for the moment. […]