I found the belo description of and IBMers experience of a meeting in Second Life and it highlighted the big challenges that virtual world. I personally have given up on Second Life and await a new virtual world that is actually usable. I had high hopes and even founded the Identity Gang. I am by no means techno-illiterate. I can handle new interfaces but SL's is just so un-intuative. Then on top of that basically every time I went to login in the past several months I was asked to download a new Client. WHY! I have no idea but nothing was apparently better (usually for software programs or browsers the new version actually does something apparently new and better). Then a few months back they had a 'break in' and some how I couldn't get to mine and I was going to have to call them to get a login.

Franz Dill had this to say about SL:

Not all of the participants (including me) were highly skilled at controlling their character, so there was lots of bumping, colliding and fidgeting before getting people in their seats.

Like most SL presentations this consists of words typed in a chat box and supporting visuals. The visuals, though, require some adeptness with zooming in to a screen, also something more of an advanced technique. As a result the visuals were mostly just repetitions of the chat text. While the presentation goes on, you can IM other people in the crowd to create a back conversation, but that too can become confusing, and if you type in the wrong box, your acid comment becomes part of the public presentation!

Once the short presentation was over, we were invited to group teleport to a number of venues that IBM and their clients had developed. Teleporting groups is also something that the interface does not do well, so with each teleport some folks were left behind. You could also fly there, if you knew the way.