A Flash Lite User Group in 2nd Life?
October 27th, 2007 by Scott Janousek
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OK, this is tough to explain, but basically Max Antinori has created a 2nd Life Flash Lite User Group. Why? Because it’s trendy and new? Yes. but I’d like to think that this might potentially be much more if it could utilized in a few ways (which I’ll talk about later in this post).
2nd Life was a tangent topic of both discussion and amusement at one of our past Flash Mobile user group meetings, and although I had heard about it before, I had never joined in this “other world”.
Now, I’m not going to explain what 2nd Life actually is, other than to say it’s a virtual world … I’ve only actually entered this world twice to figure out what it was “all about”. I find the economic and potential social aspects of it very intriguing.
The more I hear about various companies and organizations are using 2nd life for legitimate business purposes, makes it even more fascinating.
For instance, someone was recently telling me that either IBM or Microsoft actually has a full-time HR employee to help create, and manage 2nd life profiles for real employees. Not sure if there is any truth to this, but I found it truly bizarre, yet oddly cutting edge at the same time.
Flash Lite in 2nd Life
Starting a 2nd Life Flash Mobile User Group just started off as an off the cusp remark to trying to get the global Flash Lite community together for a virtual lunch … then I heard about a post that you should know about.
Max created a Flash Lite User Group within this very diverse and gigantic virtual world. I found this quite particularly striking and I share the same optimistic view of this medium for collaboration, education, and business purporses:
“There’s some really cool possibilities for virtual collaboration, meetings, prototyping, especially when folks are spread across the globe and geography is an obstacle to face to face interaction.”
He has even go as far as creating a custom skin of a virtual Flash Mobile t-Shirt … no, it’s not as the cool legacy 1.1 API shirt, but still trendy for mobile.
Chumby
If you didn’t know there exists a virtual chumby within 2nd life. Of course the real mccoy is a 10x more productive and useful, but there’s something very mystical about having virtual mobile devices in a virtual world.
October 27th, 2007 at 11:24 pm
Thanks for the post, Scott! Yes, it remains to be seen how useful Second Life can be for serious meet ups, collaboration, etc. So time will tell on that one. And I admit it is a pretty bizarre environment, just log on and you’ll see what I mean. At the same time, it IS funny that hanging out in SL can be seen as odd, while spending hours playing World of Warcraft or Halo is perfectly normal.
I’ll look around for that SL chumby until I get my own real one. As for the legacy 1.1 API shirt, I could arrange for that to make it into SL 
Max
October 28th, 2007 at 1:28 am
Is there anyway to create a direct link into 2nd life to a group? I’d add it to my signature if so … user would need 2nd life installed … but still …
Yeah, I don’t get the whole “Master Chief” thing myself … I guess I’m just a bit out of touch with Halo.
I suppose I should play, as I’m always seeing Flash Folk talk about Halo 3 multiplayer games on twitter … and coincidentally, I do have an xBox 360 collecting dust.
October 28th, 2007 at 5:12 am
Hi,
I’m not sure to get the point about SL communities, what does Sl brings you that you couldn’t do with “traditional” tools? The virtual world doesn’t help meeting nor communicating IMHO.
Mots of the companies that are on SL doesn’t profit from it in terms of usefulness, the only profit is the buzz around it.
Maybe I’m a bit pessimist, but I still need to understand why SL is useful…
October 29th, 2007 at 12:47 am
Amhet, have you logged in?
October 31st, 2007 at 3:50 pm
I don’t believe you can make a SL link to a group, only to a location, but I’ll look into whether there’s any “slurl” for gorups.
Ahmet, I’m not an SL evangelist by any means, so have no stake in promoting using SL just because it has “buzz” or is trendy (although I’m not sure SL is actually considered “cool” yet, except perhaps on the MIT campus or some parts of Silicon Valley) I’ve only begun exploring its potential in the past 6 months or so. I DO believe it has potential though, and the virtual context does add things that are not present in other online communication mediums. What I would recommend is logging on and checking it out some evening on your own, perhaps attending a “class” in SL to see what that’s like, exploring, etc. You may find it does get a few lightbulbs going that you hadn’t though of. Or not, no guarantees by me!
And for the record, SL is NOT a replacement for real-life, face to face meetups. But an alternative when those are not convenient or possible.