Should Second Life Live on Your Intranet? -- Intranet Journal

Should Second Life Live on Your Intranet?

Paula Gregorowicz

4/29/2008

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The opportunities seem to extend well beyond its game-like feel and use as an internal tool. 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.

In this Fortune Magazine article, Linden CEO Philip Rosendale shares his take on the opportunity with IBM:

"Say IBM uses our code to build its own intranet version that's somewhat different from Second Life," he says."A user may say 'Wow, this virtual thing IBM has built is pretty cool. Now I want to go to the mainland.' And we have another customer." In effect, Linden hopes to control the standards for virtual worlds so that they become the equivalent of the HTTP and HTML standards that define the web."

It is all pretty surreal, at least when I think of it. The virtual reality even has its own currency called the Linden dollar that can be converted into U.S. dollars. In fact, just recently Second Life Avatars attended a U.S. House or Representatives hearing on the topic of concerns about policing and discouraging illegal activities within its metaverse.

One thing is certain: I didn't watch enough science fiction as a child to truly understand all this. Yet it is clear that the possibilities available to businesses by leveraging this 3D world are worth keeping an eye on. While the development of an enterprise ready solution is in its very early explorations with this IBM announcement, technology moves fast. It is worth watching the developments within this brave new world and entertaining questions around if/how this might fit into your organization's long-term strategy.

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