Second Life—the massively multiplayer online virtual world of islands and avatars, with registered users numbered in the millions—is not without its controversy. Recently Time magazine named Second Life fifth on its list of the five worst Web sites. Of course the fact that Time identified Second Life as a Web site at all casts a long shadow of doubt on the periodical's geek credibility. As Second Life registered users (a.k.a. "residents") know, creating your Second Life (SL) requires a standalone client: Leave your browsers at the door.
Still, the initial flush of gee-whiz media attention that colored SL's first year, has predictably died back a notch or two of late, making room for more cynical, less wide-eyed assessments from publications such as Wired, which last week published a sharply critical piece that highlighted a few early failures among Fortune 500 companies, such as Coca-Cola, that were brave enough to embrace SL very early with some highly experimental marketing initiatives.
But whether or not Second Life turns out to be the kind of place where next-generation consumer product marketing succeeds is completely irrelevant to the millions of residents who have already figured out exactly what Second Life is, incontrovertibly, good for: An intellectual craft fair where distance, nation, and even time can be checked at the door, allowing interest, curiosity, and affinity to lead likeminded people to find one another.
While SL has earned—and somewhat deserves—a reputation as a global hookup lounge, if that's all you've been able to see it as, you're not digging past the first boring layer of virtual crust. Plan your visits strategically and keep your teleporting directed to lands that have focused agendas and you should quickly find that SL unlocks heretofore unseen potential for professional networking, intellectual exchange, and even project recruitment. In short, if you think SL is designed for passive entertainment, you're going to be disappointed. Arrive with direction, passion, and a spirit for collaboration, and the sky is the limit.
Getting the First Mover Advantage
While the types of affinities that SL can facilitate are as far reaching as human imagination, geeks always have the first-mover advantage in software innovations. That means SL is already being used by thousands of developers for everything from day-to-day programming issues to virtual consortiums to specific open source project collaborations.
Codestation Coder's Challenge—the Sentinel 2.0 Project. Can you build the ultimate SENTINEL defender? Compete against your fellow coders and explore Second Life as you strive to defeat evil and protect Codestation. Beginning on Tuesday, July 31 all of the details on the Challenge can be found at specially marked kiosks in Codestation.
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It would be difficult to argue that any company, except perhaps Second Life creator Linden Labs itself, has done more than IBM to promote the cause of developer collaboration in Second Life. In fact, IBM's interest and investment in Second Life has been swift and aggressive, with company executives citing their vision for so-called "v-business" interaction—the ability for IBM employees, customers, and business partners to communicate and meet "in world" as an alternative to traditional conference calls—as just one compelling reason that IBM will continue to embrace SL as an internal business tool. Already IBM has used SL to conduct virtual meetings and it is planning an in-world IBM alumni convention. And while those uses of SL will continue, for the developerWorks division of IBM, the ideas and opportunities for utilizing SL to support the development community in far broader ways have come fast and furiously.
Jason Clark, a software engineer with the developerWorks group who is also a longtime expert in online game development, likens the SL experience to that of attending a live music concert. "Recording artists … have their product in various forms: CD, MP3, and a stage show—up close and personal. What we have offered in the past as developerWorks' presence is simply a Web presence with content aggregation." While that works fine for a static, recorded experience, with Second Life, he explains, IBM can bring you something far more interactive. "You don't have to come to us; we can come to you."
Clark admits that at this early stage, everything is experimental, but that's part of the point. "We're in the exploratory stages of it," explains Clark, "and looking for the best ways to leverage the Second Life environment. We want to be there during the learning stages while every one else is learning too." IBM has even made headlines recently as the first company to release an internal guideline for employee conduct in SL and other online virtual worlds.
IBM, it seems, is ready and willing to ride out the inevitable ups and downs of this emergent technology, for better or for worse. And since that's exactly the kind of thing that developers do everyday, it's an attitude that many will recognize and appreciate. As we've seen in the past with Linux and open source, when IBM eats the dog food, it doesn't leave any in the bowl.
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