Blue Chi’s

Just came from the Digital Nation seminar that was held at the intercon. I did not think that it was the most amazing, I actually personally do not think that Second Life will necessarily work for tourism because:

1. The fact that you have a place in second life does not mean that anybody will visit it. Just like the fact that if have a website on the internet that does not mean that people will visit it. You still need to promote your content. How are we going to promote (not build) Oman in second life?
2. The demographic of the second life users are not the same as those Oman targets to come to it as tourists.

Investing in second life can also be a real risk because building places on it can be expensive, I do not know how much it would actually cost to build something in SL, but I imagine a full proper building would be in the tens of thousands of dollars and a city will surely be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Add to this the fact that you probably cannot reuse these assets (3D models and objects) for other purposes because of SL’s proprietary environment.

Second Life has major accessibility and usability issues such as:

1. It requires the user to install the game on their machine to actually get into Second Life. Second life cannot be accessed from internet tables, mobile phones, or anything other than a proper PC with a proper graphics card and a highspeed internet connection. Not all people have this.
2. Second Life is not as easy to use as people make it sound, just customizing your avatar takes time and can be a hard thing to do. Even just moving the player and flying around is not something that you can expect the average Omani Internet user to do. Young people who grew up playing games will get it, but don’t expect a 30 something Omani person to learn it now. Building content for Second Life is, in plain words, difficult to do and requires high technical skills.
3. Second Life requires a high speed internet connection and the internet connection in Oman, including the latest upgrades by Omantel, suffers from connection quality issues (such as those affecting latency) that make online games lag.

I am too tired to write a lot about what I think of this topic, but I generally think that social networks such as Facebook and MySpace are better places to easily promote products and services – FOR FREE. In Facebook, anybody can create a page or a group, and then just use the viral nature of these social networks to spread the word. Instead of trying to recreate the Muscat Festival in second life a group can be easily created to which Facebook users can subscribe and receive the latest news about.

Anyway, the Chocolate Fudge was so good it compensated for my disapproval of the use of Second Life to promote tourism. But then again I did not network well at all, I didn’t talk to a single new person – and that was not cool. Hopefully the next one will be better!