My first Second Life Experience
Encouraged by Shel and Neville (or should I say Shel Witte and Jangles Junot?) from my favourite podcast For Immediate Release I enlisted for Second Life today.
Enrolling in Second Life is very easy. You just go through a couple of input screens, on one of which you must chose a Second Life Name for yourself. I went for the name “Marcel Goodfellow”. There is only a selected number of last names to choose from. First names are free fields.
Only the final screen made me think a bit, because here they ask you to enter your credit card details, enticing you with a bonus 250 Linden Dollars (the SL currency). But you can skip this part and miss the bonus as well of course. The credit card details are just handy when you want to upgrade to more functionality, which is not free, unlike the basic account.
Starting in Second Life could seem a bit daunting for the average person behind a screen, as there are many options to choose from and besides from just wandering around, navigating might look hard at first instance. There is definitely a learning curve here!
However, via clicking on the teleport to the Podcast Island link provided by Shel and Jangles I was able to find my way around in a well developed area. Finding the “FIR Booth”(see first photo) was only a matter of minutes. I sticked around for a while and then went for a walk. When returning again to FIR I was suddenly greeted by a guy in a very nice Wizards suit (one of the listeners?) and we even exchanged some words too! My first chat in SL!
By the way, while staying on Podcast Island there was some very cool music playing in the background. It appeared to be a some kind of Web radio station. In fact it was so cool that even my 2 year old joint the party and threw me of my seat in front of the computer (see photo).
Well, now I can imaging that this Second Life thing can certainly get quite addictive. It is just fun to wander around and imaging if you could talk to fellow FIR listeners around the FIR booth. It definitely seems a better experience than any normal chat could provide.
I wonder whether it is possible to localise this concept, i.e. can I have one for my town to walk around in an chat with other local persons this way? Just “Shaping-a-Thought” here.
Technorati tags: Second Life, For Immediate Release, Social software, Web2.0, Web 2.0
Add to del.icio.us 
| 
posted Jun 26, 02:08 PM on Jun 26, 2006 |
category: Second Life
/ Social software