Why Second Life Sucks for Meetings
Submitted by Nick Wilson on Fri, 03/06/2009 - 09:13
Submitted by Nick Wilson on Fri, 03/06/2009 - 09:13
I was recently asked to explain why we weren't recommending Second Life as a solution to a clients virtual trade show. Rather than list a bunch of reasons in email, I've decided to blog a true story that illustrates my reasoning. This actually happened to me yesterday...
Let me explain point by point what was going on here, and how it makes Second Life a far from ideal platform for some types of meetings;
Second Life is a networked grid of servers. This means that although you can't necessarily see it, every island is connected to every other island, and every avatar to every other avatar through a central bank of servers. These servers deal with things like an avatars inventory, including clothes, and the ability to teleport to other locations in the world.
If due to high usage those servers get overloaded, or experience any other technical problems, it can affect the entire world. Unfortunately this is a fairly common occurance.
You cannot (yet) control those servers. You are wholely reliant upon Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. The best you might hope to do in an emergency is submit a support ticket and pray someone gets back to you that day.
The recent case study that we published (and then Linden Lab did, with much better press coverage!) of IBM's large scale virtual conference is missing one very important point at first glance. (The details are in there, but not in the headlines you read.): IBM, by special arrangement with Linden Lab ran their conference on their own servers, behind their own firewall, and had complete control over the entire experience.
That option is not available to mere mortals, yet.- .............................................................................................................................
Here are a few questions worth asking yourself if you're planning a large Second Life event:
........................................ finisci di leghttp://cleverzebra.com/blog/why-second-life-sucks-meetingsgere l'articolo qui
Next week I plan to write a sister post entitled
"Why Second Life Rocks for Meetings",
detailing some situations where Second Life is perfect for events, and even how to mitigate some of the risks I've talked about here.
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