To Chat or Not ot Chat....

For the group chat task I decided to give Second Life a go, given that it was about the only one on the list I haven't already used. Well I let my self in for a lot of time being used up with that one!

First was the downloading, installing, registering and setting up a character process.... Not too bad until it came time to edit my character. Setting up my character was fiddly to say the least and took a couple of hours to work out how to change clothes, hair etc. In this time I also worked out how to move around and a few other basics of using Second Life. It wasn't all boring though, I met a few others that were new to second life while running around help island.... including one person who managed to loose all of her clothes except the shoes and couldn't work out how to put them back on!! Boy was I glad I never had that problem!

Finally a few weeks later I managed to arrange a chat time with Amanda to meet up in second life.... I thought it would be straight forward from there... I got that wrong.

First we couldn't find each other... turns out there is more than one version of help island, and neither of us could teleport to where the other one was. About 25 minutes later and a lengthy msn conversation about finding each other in Second Life finally placed us in the same location!!

Due to computer lag the conversation had a lot of massive pauses between posts. There was no conversation threading in the local chat, and each post vanished after a few seconds on the screen, resulting in the screen needing to be constantly watched.

After a while we worked out how to use the private direct chat. This resolved the lag issue until a few minutes later when my computer decided to totally boot me off second life. Resulting in a reversion to msn yet again!

Give me msn, Skype, or any other IM chat over Second Life any day! Second Life is not a practical or usable program in my opinion due to:

• Needing to be in the same location as someone to chat, not a straight forward thing!
• Tying up the whole computer so I can't multitask.
• Tying up all of the wireless bandwidth on our home network so other computer trying to access the Internet were ridiculously slow.
• Limited conversation threading......
• And just plain time consuming for the small amount of benefit.

The only positives I can give Second Life, is that I did have fun playing with the characters outfits. I even managed to get myself a nice pair of wings which was a bit of fun.

Overall though I won't be using second life any time again in the near future!