To get the screen shot of the IBM CODESTATION area in Second Life that I showed you on Wednesday, I had to register for Second Life, download the client, log in, and flail around for awhile until something worked well enough for me to get where I was going. I vaguely remembered something about Second Life (whether true or not) that made me nervous about giving them a credit card number, so I had to operate witho To get the screen shot of the IBM CODESTATION area in Second Life that I showed you on Wednesday, I had to register for Second Life, download the client, log in, and flail around for awhile until something worked well enough for me to get where I was going. I vaguely remembered something about Second Life (whether true or not) that made me nervous about giving them a credit card number, so I had to operate without any Linden dollars, Second Life’s local currency.The Second Life client basically brought my primary writing computer to its knees. That computer is a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 Desktop with 768 MB of RAM and NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 420 video. After getting the screen shot, I logged out of Second Life, uninstalled the client, and installed it on my primary software development computer, a 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 Desktop with 2 GB of RAM and NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 video. It ran much better on that machine.It still wasn’t a wonderful experience. When I teleported to the “home” area I was assigned, I couldn’t do anything: I kept getting messages about the server being full. (This may have been because of a database problem at Linden Labs.) My avatar was surrounded by other avatars in various stages of dress and undress generally acting lost and typing stimulating things like “Where are you from?”I would see occasional signs touting locations in Second Life, but they would always be for some sort of R-rated porn. I had a quick look at the list of the most popular places in the system by traffic, and they were pretty much all porn. I went to a couple of them, and they weren’t even interesting porn: I’d rather read a Pynchon novel, thank you very much. As far as I can tell, Second Life isn’t really work-safe, or even home-safe if you have children. I can’t imagine why IBM, Sun, and others are doing PR or developer communities in Second Life.I remember Jon Udell discussing PR in Second Life in his column last fall, and he made it sound credible. Am I missing something here? Software Development