Second Life Offers Business Teleconferencing, Now Penis-Free
It's still not a great idea. Griefers -- troublemakers who show up at Second Life events and try to annoy people -- were indeed a serious problem for potential business users. But there's far bigger concerns:
- Second Life remains hard, much much too hard, for new users to learn. Relatively fundamental things in Second Life -- how to walk, how to communicate, how to log chat -- require several hours of practice to get the hang of.
- The service has terrible reliability. By Linden's own numbers, Second Life software crash rates hover around 20%. Servers deliver poor performance 4% of the time. And of course, the more people in a Second Life region at a time (as in the case of a teleconference), the worse the performance.
- Second Life simply adds no value beyond existing, proven, cheap, and easy-to-use technologies. Everyone knows how to use a telephone, and they always work. If desktop collaboration is needed as well, there's Cisco's (CSCO) WebEx, among other tools.
It's good to see Second Life thinking out of the box -- for a company that pioneered radical new tools, Linden has been surprisingly complacent in recent years. But if something is to be done to make Second Life essential, this isn't it.
See also:
Thinking of Advertising in Second Life? Don't Bother
IBM Drinks Second Life Kool-Aid, Makes More For Lotus Users
THe real value in SL seems to be for education, rather than business. Maths and science could be a lot more interesting without accidentally blowing up the lab... :-)
In the sMeet 3D worlds, users do not have to just use text chat to communicate with one another. The opportunity to be able to speak with other avatars in the 3D world live per telephone, is completely new. With use of a telephone (mobile or landline) one can dial into the 3D world, to be able to meet and talk with up to 70 other users in the same room. The users can hear each other and amplification of the voice depends on the spatial distance between the individual avatars, much the same as in real life (…) Therefore the experience is not only visual, it is also auditory. So, at the moment, sMeet is offering the most thrilling communicative surf experience in the market. Conferences and meetings can be completely prevented – and all this, unlike Second Life, is without download.
You need more informations - contact us @ ww.smeet.de
sl is voice-enabled. go and watch the immersive workspaces' commercial again. there's absolutley no need for clumsy phones. come loose and download the sl-viewer and "Make what is typically a boring activity a bit more fun. Not just boring in a different way." - as joining dots mentioned above.
These micro-computer things are just toys, no one will EVER use them in the real business world.
"The release of the Macintosh is the death knell for Apple computer. They will be out of business in six months." - 1985
CD-ROM does seem to hold some promise, but it has to many problems to overcome to be really viable.
Multi-media is a just a bunch of hype. - Okay, maybe that one was true...
This Internet thing is just a passing fad. There isn't any real practicle use for business. The only people who use it are the techies hanging out on the BBS'.
I have attended a business presentation sitting around a campfire in SL where two people were in San Francisco, one was in LA, another in North Carolina, and another in London. We were all wearing headsets, having normal conversations while also exchanging text commentary to supplement the voice. We generated 3D objects like holograms to demonstrate the topics and at one point all teleported to another location to examine "in person" the product under discussion.
And, this is the nascent version of this technology. Look at the difference between a PC of 1988 and 2008, CD-ROM and DVD, the Internet of 1994 and 2008, and see beyond the narrow confines of the immediate.
Sure, SL has a learning curve, so does Excel for the first time user. It is easy to be dismissive but it is the visionaries who leapfrog us ahead.