IBM on the Importance of Second Life Integration

Trailing slightly in my reading, but a blog post in November from IBM hits on one of three important points that will, in my opinion, determine Second Life’s success for 2008.

Says the IBM blogger:

A lot of virtual world advocates (no few of them my IBM colleagues!) consider virtual worlds to be the overarching technology. Where it is to interact with other technologies they are to be incorporated in the virtual world. I see it more open. That virtual worlds is as often an embedded technology as it is an embedding technology. My competition entry above embedded aspects of Second Life into my Notes 8 desktop to better integrate my Second Life activities into my daily work efforts. One could have considered, instead, embedding Notes 8 into Second Life, so that I could carry out my desktop activities while in Second Life.

He further commented on how integration might have saved AOL’s presence in SL, which migrated to VLES:

So, lets say that Second Life had opened up it’s instant messaging layer and allowed other systems to federate with it. Or at least do the Trilliam approach and allow for client side integration. Would AOL have migrated? I’m thinking that if they had the ability to more tightly integrate the AOL experience they provide to their customers with the Second Life experience they created that they might have gotten the cross over sales they might have wanted.

Now, admittedly, IBM is a bit biased towards integration hoping to be the glue to virtual world development much as it was so proactive during the launch of e-commerce, and later through its involvement with Linux. Integration, whether through the portable avatar or cross-talk between virtual and 2D Web services is how business can stop thinking about virtual worlds as separate investments and start seeing them as spends across 2D, social and even printed media.

Croquet is gaining greater momentum in the education domain primarily because of its integration of Web pages within virtual worlds. If I had a service or product that I was selling through the Web and “offline”, the addition of a quick, easy to access sales room in a virtual space, where I could pull up specifications, PowerPoint presentations, and then allow the customer to take a “test drive” of whatever it was I was selling in an immersive 3D environment – sounds like a pretty nifty way to use Web platforms.

But Second Life, which touts that it is a user-generated world, is still a walled garden. Even the use of third-party programs like Maya and thus the import of sculpts into Second Life wasn’t well supported by the Lindens. The ability to embed Web pages and Web services within Second Life are one of three make-or-break-it items on my agenda for 2008.

Whether this is accompanied by opening up some of the source and allowing third-party hosting of SL islands would be a bonus – privacy concerns, especially by non-US concerns such as schools, are a BIG issue. So long as the servers are owned by a corporation (and a US one at that) and sit on US soil with no back-up, controls, and subject to US law, some institutions will continue to stay away from SL (at least in Canada, my neck of the woods).

The other two issues are grid stability and a partnership/customer stakeholder focus to service, which I’ve blogged about previously.