Thoughts on Second Life Rollout

I have been having some serious thoughts lately, regarding the necessary rollout of Second Life to the much wider community of users, not least after reading the outcome of a survey posted on Wagnet Joneses New World Notes blog in May this year of current residents. Mainly we appear to fall into the groups of innovators, capitalists, fasnionistas, role-players and social gamers.

It would seem then that in order to promote the adoption of SL we are likely to be drawing upon a population that would fall within the larger three groups or from other possibly larger though as of yet unclassified groups.

For those of us already in and enthusing about Second Life, its all to easy to forget that we are in the view of Stephen Downes, who I heard speaking at this years Eduserve Second Life conference 'the rounding error'! A touch cynical maybe, but compared to the desktop user-base, there is some ground to be made up here.

Essentially Second Life will I suspect to all intents and purposes be a product that we have to sell, sitting as it does for most outside the mainstream of the more familiar Office type applications.

I decided to look into the possibility of making an SL application that could be seen to draw upon some of the standard desktop software, though here I am coming from a Windows perspective, equivalents are readily available.

The outcome has been a Forum. Like all forums you can post, reply, open and email users, features I readillyachieved through some Linden Scripting. More importantly though, because why reinvent the wheel when there are plenty of good forums out there already, there has to be some advantage, and this is where the attributes of working in a virtual world such as Second Life can pay off, because now a forum can be visual, almost tactile and sociable. Basically each post is a prim, whose texture is generated from a Word template, saved in Paint and whose main content it dropped into the finished prim as a notecard.

Once completed a user, in Edit Mode, a cunning plot to get them involved, simply positions the new posting onto, rather than into the forum. There is going to be an opportunity here to witness the emergence of some interesting forum patterns I feel.

Sound interesting? Well you can take a look, because I posted a video up to YouTube

If you have any feedback just drop me an IM, email or teleport over to Shimmer Island for a chat.