At noon today, Pacific time, a conference on “avatar-based marketing” was scheduled to occur in Second Life, the metaverse that is gaining popularity and momentum at a stratling rate. I had set up an account long ago, and had played around a bit on the newbie island, but whenever I got to the sign that allowed me to leave the island, I was stopped in my tracks by the notice that, once I left, I could never come back.

But with the conference today, it was time to get my feet wet. I surfed over to the web page that had the teleport link that would take me directly to the conference. I clicked it and wound up in a completely different place. Using the map, I tried to find the conference based on the coordinates on the meeting web page, but the map told me it was in a place that didn’t exist.

Neville was there—he’d shared his Second Life name with me, and we were able to instant message. But when I tried to find him, the system told me he didn’t exist. When he tried to find me, he got the same response. After about 30 minutes of frustration, I finally decided to quit the application and relaunch it. That’s when I got the message telling me a server problem was making my destination inaccessible. A server problem! At least it wasn’t my fault! Neville and the others attending the conference had arrived before the problem kicked in; I had arrived after.

So I played around a bit at Podshow Island (Adam Curry was there, but I didn’t talk to anyone), then gave up and went back to work. A bit later, Neville told me a grid failure had pretty much bounced everyone off Second Life.

I’ll try it again tomorrow, now that I’m out and about. But I’d been looking forward to evaluating a professional development opportunity in Second Life, and the server issues raise a note of concern about conducting such efforts, at least until it’s reasonably certain the metaverse will behave according to its own laws of physics.