Learning2.0 : Journey to about2findout.com

I've been planning to revisit Second Life ever since I got my more powerful computer. A couple of weeks ago I tried, but of course had forgotten my password. And the online retrieval didn't work, and just referred me to make a US based support call. Right. Not going to happen.

Today the password reset did work, so I made my reappearance on Second Life after about 6 months of inactivity. One striking change: you now have to agree to an empty terms and conditions. (See screenshot). I took the risk and was back in. There have been a few improvements in the time I was away. The most remarkable and high on my wish list: they have voice communication now! But Second Life is still a very lonely place unless you make appointments or have events. I teleported to about 10-15 places and found myself all alone on every single one of them. And I can't say the performance is much better than on my older computer, in spite of having a QuadCore processor and 4 GB of RAM memory now. Buildings still reveal themselves very slowly.
The IBM islands have also changed, and there are much more of them. Even a dedicated one to the Benelux region. On one of the IBM islands there is a cool water slide, try it out! And the SOA group (that's acronym talk for Service Oriented Architecture) even made a kind of learning experience / game.

Second Life is still the biggest virtual environment, but not the only one. I've been in ActiveWorlds also lately. For a comparison of different virtual platforms, please visit :

http://www.virtualworldsreview.com/

Labels: Second Life, virtual worlds