Second Life for Businesses?
I have just finished reading an article by Paula Gregorowicz about the possibility of adopting Second Life into an organisations Intranet System.
When I first read this, I thought, “pppssssfftt….yeah right. What the hell would that be used for?”
Some of you may be asking, “What is Second Life?” Second Life is “…an Internet-based virtual world. To be exact, it was inspired by Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash and the desire to create a metaverse or a user defined world in which people can interact, communicate, do business, and all the same things we do in the real world. It uses a client-installed piece of software that players (called residents) use to navigate this world and interact with each other using avatars (an image or model used to represent you) providing an advanced level of social networking.”
However, IBM are now planning to host Second Life on their own servers.
Gregorowicz explains that Second Life is starting to catch the attention of large organisations such as IBM because of “…the ability to use Second Life as a platform for a whole new Net — this one in 3D and even more social than the original — with huge opportunities to sell products and services…..Because of its 3D nature, it allows geographically distant people to not only attend meetings as a regular teleconference might, but also allows the personal and professional mingling to occur before and after the meetings as well, because you can interact in this virtual world much as you might when leaving the conference room with colleagues from a local meeting.”
However even though the idea sounds exciting, the viability of utilising such applications within organisations is yet to be proven.
