Lotusphere in Second Life
Category Technology
It's tough to be missing Lotusphere for the second year in a row. Like many people I've gone to every other one and now January and Lotusphere are pretty much synonymous. For various reasons, I am sitting home this year again reading everyone's blogs and trying to experience as much as possible vicariously. By reading the press releases and downloading the presentations in a month or two will get me most of the technical information I need, missing the Opening General Session is the biggest loss for me. Yes, the technical sessions are great, the labs and the networking are very important, but for me, the OGS always set the stage for the rest of the year. Just the ability to sense the mood of the audience and how the presentations were accepted has always seemed to foretell whether or not it will be a good year. I therefore came as a pleasant surprise to find that Lotusphere would be available on-line in "Second Life".
It's tough to be missing Lotusphere for the second year in a row. Like many people I've gone to every other one and now January and Lotusphere are pretty much synonymous. For various reasons, I am sitting home this year again reading everyone's blogs and trying to experience as much as possible vicariously. By reading the press releases and downloading the presentations in a month or two will get me most of the technical information I need, missing the Opening General Session is the biggest loss for me. Yes, the technical sessions are great, the labs and the networking are very important, but for me, the OGS always set the stage for the rest of the year. Just the ability to sense the mood of the audience and how the presentations were accepted has always seemed to foretell whether or not it will be a good year. I therefore came as a pleasant surprise to find that Lotusphere would be available on-line in "Second Life".
I explored Worlds Away and Active Worlds years ago but never got past feeling like it was just a game and lost interest quickly. I've seen a lot of references to Second Life for the last year or so, and even made an attempt to access it some months ago. I discovered, that not being a gamer I was missing the appropriate Video Card in all of my desktops. I always build my desktops and servers and typically use Intel motherboards these days so everything I have uses the Intel graphics hardware which is certainly fine for business applications but not supported by Second Life. Even the machines with dual monitors have low-end ATI cards that are also not supported. I started looking around to figure out how quickly I could get a new card - but there is no such thing as overnight delivery - the fastest anything arrives is next week.
I was getting discouraged, but then saw a comment from Ed Brill that his 3 year old laptop could run SL, and sure enough when I fired up the T42 Thinkpad it was compatible. Unfortunately, I can't see the entire presentation - the limitations and time-outs inherent with my satellite connection result in video feed, stopping and restarting from the beginning after a couple of minutes. But that's a "personal" problem. Limitations of my internet connection aside, the whole experience is quite interesting. After wandering around the IBM island for a day, I am very impressed. I'm not sure that it is the next "big thing" in collaboration but it does represent yet another approach. The concept of allowing companies to buy and develop areas is brilliant, and it is fascinating to see how the world develops. I'm enthralled with it just as a social experiment watching the on-line civilization develop - I'm sure that it will not take much poking around to stumble on a thriving seamy side of this world but then that is true in "first life" as well. I don't expect that Secondlife will become an important business tool over time, but like so many products in the past (Agenda, TopView/Desqview, Paradox) it represents a new direction that others will continue to improve and enhance over time. I ordered a couple of new video cards last night, so I guess I'll stick around to see what develops over time.
Comments
Posted by Jack Dausman At 12:07:12 AM On 2007/01/29 | - Website - |