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My company encouraged us to join and get familiar with it...
There is a lot of worldly stuff there, including porn and gambling (just like the internet) so I guess it will be a toss-up as to whether it will be "acceptable" by the status quo or not (especially after some of the conversations I have seen on these forums, but that is a separate topic that is being discussed ad nauseum).
Think of it like a chat room, except completely three-dimensional, where your character actually walks around, dressing and looking like you wish him to look. There are virtual churches in Secondlife, there is live music done by amateurs and professionals, where you can congregate in a room together and "attend" the performance. You can have meetings there, show presentations, giving a better feel for each others personalities than if you were just on a conference call.
There is an exchange rate with real money and a real stock market where you can invest in companies within the environment. IBM has a huge campus there, as well as many other companies... there is no goal, other than whatever goal you make, so it is not a game, although due to the graphical interface it might look like a game. Also, you can walk into a virtual Circuit City or Sears store, look at a camera or IPOD on display, zoom in to see it from any angle, and then double-click to purchase it. You can purchase both real-life items and virtual items for use in the game, all while using real money.
You also create the content yourself, you can buy and sell land, build a house, a church, a business, actually building the walls and furnishing it how you wish. You can take out ads advertising your business. There are actually people making a living in real life by their businesses within Second Life.
Many people at IBM are calling this technology the Internet version 3.0 where what we are using right now is referred to as Internet 2.0.
I've attached a picture of me standing in the IBM Careers office within Second Life as well as one of me standing in a virtual IBM datacenter (NOC) which is being designed. This one has real-time monitoring and alerts which are received from servers in real life. You would be able to know which servers have a problem and if someone is already working on them just like if you were standing in a real datacenter looking across the raised floor towards where the action is.
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