It seems as though whenever one mentions ‘virtual world’ the first thing that comes to mind is Second Life (SL). Admittedly, this is perhaps the most well known virtual world platform and certainly the largest ‘sandbox.’ Recently, Linden Lab (SL’s purveyor and overlord) released Q1 2009 performance data stating that SL users logged 124 million hours! So what are users doing? Most get caught up in creating there own avatar, utilizing the cheap economy of Linden dollars (L$) micro-currency, purchasing land, building things and enjoying 3D chat – think lots of socializing. Obviously, SL does appeal to the vast majority of early adopter virtual world users. Now, what if you are in the government or corporate sectors and like what virtual worlds offer? After a little digging most traditional or legacy organizations gin up concerns around the SL brand (the remnants of early ‘lawlessness” in SL and resulting bad press that just never seems to die).

So, in spite of a much more civil environment and continued strong use, the reservations never quite seem to go away, they just linger like a the Hong Kong haze…
- It’s not private and secure
-Too much variability and not enough control over the user, the user may roam freely in an open world environment
- No control on whom the user is able to talk to or how the avatar is set up
- Doesn’t play well with most enterprise firewalls

All these issues and others have hindered SL’s adoption by corporate/government. Linden recognizes this and is working with IBM and Intel to solve some of these issues. We hope to see some headway in ’09 as SL attempts to become an emerging platform standard for enterprise.

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