Microsoft on Second life

I've been reading on a number of sites about the Second Life phenomenon. Having read Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash' I was wondering when this virtual world stuff would be taken to the next level. And indeed, Microsoft has an island on the SL planet (universe?) that is very sophisticated as you might expect from a group of programmers.

My daughter has been exploring for a while now so I talked to her about her experience. She said it was okay but that it got to seem like a big chat room after a while (with millions of users). She said she preferred World of WarCraft because it was more like a game than SL.

So I created a free profile for myself and my wife from the Second Life portal. Then I went through the tutorial which took me much longer than I would have expected. Hint, don't start this during the work week; I did it during my three-day Memorial Day weekend. I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that it sucked up over ten hours of my free time in that three day period!

So I finally got on the SL world and visited the Microsoft properties. The Visual Studio in SL site is blogged about in Miel Van Opstal's blog. He includes a Soapbox video that is very nicely done. I'm not sure that there is anything particularly noteworthy yet but I do recognize that there are a lot of people world wide that are playing in this space and looking for the next great thing.