I'll have Science Girl email you. She's poked around on it a bit, although I think she's just about given up on it.

because a business acquaintance of mine wants to have meetings on there

Jump. Jump now.

I was on there for a day or two and then realized it was just full of casinos, spam, and furries trying to hook up. So I left.

Matt and Jess talked about SL a bit during the last podcast...

I have heard of companies holding meetings on SL and I have to say it turns me off. There are lots of teleconferencing options these days and SL offers no pluses and lots of minuses. Unless it a game developer I can't believe I would want to buy from or work for a firm that holds meeting in SL.

"...so you can see that receivables, here, are congruent with expectations as we forecast in the last quarter. Inventory levels are approximately 3% lower, allowing us to harvest efficiencies that we can reinvest in our accounts process management program. Any questions? You, the pink bunny?"

Yeah, believe me, I'm pretty skeptical. I mainly am curious about these meetings because the people that are involved are a bunch of folks who I worked with in the past whom I respect. The main guy is one of those visionary startup guys who's 50% brilliant and 50% wacky. Fortunately I don't have to spend a lot of time or make a lot of commitment to this, so I can sit back and watch what happens.

Some companies do have a presence there, as well as presidential candidates, etc. The business world does use it.

I just happen to think it's kind of lame.

The only cool SL story I've ever heard is that some disabled people find it wonderful to be able to walk and talk normally in SL.

i find myself in sl on occasion, but right now the linux port is still in alpha. not only does it crash every couple of minutes but for some reason it's never able to "download" my "clothing". imagine a flying ken doll that disappears every so often. that's pretty much my sl experience in a nutshell.

the other day someone offered to sell me a penis for L$10. i laughed.

um, I might know a little about it

SL is overrated. Highly. I gave it an honest chance of about 3 months and cancelled my account. This parody nails it.

Aside from the spam and uber commercialism pelting mentioned, the mechanics of getting around and doing the simplest of things is horribly unforgiving.

Then, there's this latest trend, countered in part by this.

I think it's crap, personally. YMMV

My first life keeps me pretty busy.

As far as I could tell when I signed the registration form for life, you're really only responsible for one of them.

Second Life for real work? Gah. The only worthwhile thing to do is to hang out in the sandboxes and boggle at the intricate things people spend time creating. You could play anthropologist and visit furry and Gorean hang outs and boggle at people's fetishes, but that actually gets old pretty quick.

Also, I'd be way scared of accidentally walking into a staff meeting with a 6-foot tall purple dildo protruding out of my head. Noobs are especially prone to accidentally wearing things on their head, due to the unintuitive interface.

Investing any money or time in SL is really asinine, considering their terms and conditions basically say they can take and/or lose all your money and you have no recourse.

They reset everybody's passwords a while back after the n-teenth hack and I couldn't get my log-in to work. I'd be interested in a more mature technology with, say, the lagtime and graphical ability of a multiplayer FPS from ten years ago. Wake me when it gets there.

That sounds like the stupidest fucking idea I've heard this week - I've been on a training course all week and, believe me, I've heard some stupid shit.