It is Monday morning here in New Zealand, Sunday in the U.S., and I just tried to log in to Second Life.  But Second Life had 67,333 current logins and could handle no more load.  They were at their user limit!  C’mon, how un-scalable is this platform?

I recently asked Linden Labs how I could get a full refund for the University sim that we purchased, and I cited the highly unreliable performance of the system as the reason for my request.  Over the course of several weeks, I noted dozens of instances where the system failed, almost daily.  Now, Linden Labs may cite that they were up and running, but if teleporting doesn’t work, or clothes don’t download, or object libraries are unavailable, or certain regions are undergoing un-announced ‘maintenance’ and can’t be reached, then for a class meeting the service is a complete system failure. If we (educators) are to utilise environments like Second Life for teaching, we must have assurances that service will be available on a reliable basis.  Reliable doesn’t mean 80% available, it means 99.99%.  Industry standard.  This is crucial for Linden to understand.  It is nearly impossible to reschedule a cancelled class meeting during busy semesters, so if a class is cancelled we simply lose that time.  It is unrecoverable teaching time.   

In my request to Linden Labs I asked that we first have a discussion about a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to see if there might be a way forward.  To my shock I receive a reply from one of the do-not-reply-to ‘Lindens’ (can’t they do business in the real world?) asking me to clarify what I meant by ‘Service Level’.  Have these folks never heard of ITIL?  Again, remarkable.  Well, for those Lindens who are still sitting there with a “huh?” on their face, here is a link that will explain ITIL “…delivery and control activities to achieve operational excellence on a day-to-day basis” – Service Operation.  Read it.

I hate being so seemingly impatient, but most educators are passionate about the precious time allocated to interact with students – we cannot tolerate shoddy support systems.  These frequent SL failures cause me great concern for the future use of such systems for real education.  The great promise of high-fidelity graphics, voice and animation means nothing if reliability isn’t present.  Importantly, reliability is a prerequisite.  It must be present in the first instance, not developed after Linden experiment to see if there is community interest in the product .  Do what is necessary to provide up-front Service Level reliability, or fail.  Full stop.  Given the fact that there are dozens of such environments either in production or in development, I fear that Linden’s offering is failure waiting to happen…it may be just a matter of time.