Second Life and the Corporate Resident: Conducting Private Business In Public Phone Booths

Two links to related to a Gartner report outlining the risks of corporations entering the virtual worlds:

http://www.kauppalehti.fi/4/i/eng/releases/press_release.jsp?selected=other&oid=20070801/11864923103330&lang=EN

http://www.idm.net.au/story.asp?id=8704

So far, this is going exactly as predicted and Gartner is restating the merely obvious. It's good though. You have to think of Gartner the way your toes think about your lungs when barefoot in the snow. Until breathing becomes difficult and oxygen starvation sets in, some brains don't notice frostbite.

The next easy prediction to make is these risks will not slow the witless ones down. It will be a major security or service disruption that will do that, something along the line of an ultra-secret product or business deal being lifted by a competitor for major dollars. A personal scandal won't do it because those are the french fries of web journalism: 30 to a box and once eaten, forgotten. But as soon as major dollars go awry because a SecondLife employee sells a chat log, then we will see a flood of press releases explaining that the metaverse mavens have moved on to the next new investor technology: products that protect private business the reputation merchants, aka, the bug collectors.

One hopes their departure will go unnoticed by the serious and professional world builders who understand 3D on the web for what it is: a hypermedia wrapper and a real-time art form. No those categories won't sell stocks but understanding it leads to creative work and creative work leads to sales.

Worlds just tie other communications channels together. Corporations need to decide if they want to be doing private business in a public phone booth.