Second Life curmudgeon
I am quite skeptical about the benefits of Second Life. All the applications we have talked about so far--RSS, tagging, mashups, widgets--are all about users taking bits and pieces of larger things and reorganizing them to better fit their needs. These applications are small and can be accessed on everything from a full-powered desktop computer to smartphones. They are all about being simple, accessible, and mobile. Second Life is none of this. You have to meet Second Life on its terms. And those terms are fairly unbending.
I actually am able to use Second Life on my four-year old linux desktop, but not on my one-year old laptop (it has a low-end Intel graphics card.) I visited info island, the SLIS campus, and the Cleveland Public Library. Moving around is quirky--I got my head stuck in the ceiling of the Cleveland Public Library--other people are scarce, and it doesn't seem that there is anything I can do in Second Life that I can't do more simply and easilly through the internet. (IMing, watching videos, asking a reference question, and so on.)
In the coffee shop that I do most of my school work, I am always seeing people using MySpace and Facebook, writing email, watching YouTube, and reading blogs, but I have never once seen anybody using Second Life. It's just not part of the mainstream world like these other tools are.
