Synthesis Studios

I attended the Amazon Web Services developers meeting in Second Life this past Thursday. I’ll admit, at first I was a bit skeptical of the format in general. Aside from the “Woohoo! I’m playing games at work!” factor, I was not sure the benefits of using Second Life would outweigh the overhead. My fears were unfounded; I have been using this format, or something similar to it, for almost sixteen years.

The question may arise as to what sort of overhead I’m worried about. Before I was even able to attend the meeting I had to download and install the Second Life client. If I didn’t already have an account I would have to register one as well. All of this took less time than driving to a meeting in the same city, let alone transporting myself to one on the other side of the country.

My other big concern was if the game-like interface get in the way of attending the meeting. I found that it didn’t. Previous experience in video games  lead to a very shallow learning curve with the Second Life interface; the same has been true for everyone else I have spoken to about this. Granted, while launching rockets at your friends requires a different skill set than launching questions at a presenter, many of the mobility and environment interaction ideas carry over.

I think everyone should give this format a try. If Sun Microsystems has their way, it might not belong before meeting in a virtual environment is more than just a gimmick. I’ll be at the meeting tomorrow, Thursday the 27 at 1PM EST on the AWS island, if anyone wants to talk about this. My second life name is Huge Littlething (no pun escapes my grasp).