Plenty of people are skeptical that enterprises will embrace virtual worlds as a venue for doing serious business. IBM, on the other hand, is a total believer that 3-D worlds such as Second Life augur the future of online commerce.
IBM is announcing a partnership with Second Life producer Linden Lab today... (Read more)
Reprinted with permission from VentureBeat. Story copyright 2008 VentureBeat Inc. All rights reserved.
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It has taken quite some time for Second Life to get to this point.
The Activeworlds platform (www.activeworlds.com) of which IBM also has a stake has for over a decade now supported a model of separate universe and world servers - all of which could be firewalled - in order to allow clients full control of their users and environments - I don't see how it can be totally effective to do it any other way.
Thanks to the distributed server model employed it is also much more cost effective for IBM to pursue a platform that allows firewalling as standard (see prices at www.awportals.com/products/world_servers.php compared to those of http://secondlife.com/community/land-islands.php to see the vast differences as a result of this).
Second Life clearly has the publicity advantage, but I do not believe it has the technology advantage because it has been produced so quickly it has not had been built with many predictable needs in place.
This development is encouraging, but the world needs a lot of work on the infrastructure and UI before it is ready for prime time. I think part of the problem relates to Linden Labs' desire to make this a viable platform for business, marketing, and commerce, while retaining the freewheeling, creative nature of the world that has attracted many of its most loyal residents and creators.
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