A thorough new piece over at ZDNet Australia is examining some myths and facts about business in Second Life, which it calls "poster child and whipping boy for the virtual world movement." Among the points raised -- business use of Second Life primarily focuses education and simulation, not for virtual brand outposts and stores, and privacy is a possibility:
What you can do with that is use a series of estate tools to give you full control over that island and who can access it. You can deny specific people or groups, or just make it completely private. Sun and IBM both have public and private presences. There's quite a number of companies that do have a private presence and don't have a public presence at all."The other thing they can do as well in controlling who registers in their private area. The registration API allows you to be able to register people for Second Life yourself, and you can send them to their starting location so when they first log in they go to the right place."
Other, trickier topics includes accessibility -- what's being done to improve broadband accesssibility, and do Second Life avatars have a bigger carbon footprint than real people?
"We conduct a lot of company meetings in Second Life. With us being able to hold virtual meetings, our carbon footprint is a lot lower. Every Friday, we have an internal staff meeting and about 60 to 80 people show up -- people from all over the globe."OK, it's time to ask about virtual terrorism and, more specifically, how to defend your business against flying penises thrown by virtual vandalas. (An interview held in the Second Life presence of ZDNet Australia sister site CNET News.com earlier this year was disrupted by just such an outbreak of airborne genitalia.)
As you can imagine, there's a brief moment of uncomfortable silence when I raise this issue, but Collins eventually takes the bait. "I think again it comes down to the first point we discussed. With your estate tools you have the ability to say who can create things at your location, so you need to turn that off. It's an educational process."
