Intranet Journal
The online resource for intranet professionals
Should Second Life Live on Your Intranet?
4/29/2008
Since it launched in 2003, Second Life has been the go-to 3D virtual world on the Internet. As if living one life wasn't enough for us all, Second Life allows people to create a virtual likeness of them via an avatar and essentially explore a whole new world via the web.
Is there a need for this virtual world within the enterprise? IBM thinks so. This month, it announced it would become the first company to host private regions of the virtual world Second Life on its own servers.
Perhaps my early Gen X roots are showing, but my first reaction was -- why would we need this within the context of a business enterprise? I have yet to even wrap my head around if or how it can be useful on the intranet. Apparently I am missing a whole world out there (no pun intended).
So what is Second Life? According to Wikipedia, it's 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.
IBM's plans are to allow employees to move freely between public and private areas (behind the firewall) of Second Life. The purpose is to allow employees to use this tool for collaboration and teleconferencing.
This joint venture between IBM and Linden Labs is an experiment in creating an enterprise-ready solution with Second Life that will address platform stability and security concerns that have previously hindered widespread adoption for business application.
While it is clear that social networking is increasingly becoming a business concern as recent announcements like SocialText's adoption of Facebook Inspired Tools shows, I still have to wonder about the actual viability and usefulness within the organization, especially depending on factors such as culture, the inherent desire for the company to control all IT activities, security, perception, and adoption. Everyone knows that collaboration tools are only useful if everyone uses them.
Second Life is not just a run-of-the-mill collaboration environment though. According to a Fortune Magazine article in October 2007, there are savings and revenue to be had by using Second Life within the enterprise:
"But what's beginning to catch the attention of IBM and other huge corporations is something potentially far more profound than a new online pastime. It's 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."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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