You know how quarantines work to protect the unaffected from whatever horrific thing that is afflicting those that need to be set apart? Well, IBM in their infinite wisdom want to enable a bunch of fur-covered avatars that wear diapers and giant penises to exist outside of Second Life and run amok on the greater internet:
IBM and Linden Labs, the operator of the Second Life virtual world, said on Tuesday they will work on ways to eventually let people use a single online persona in different online services.
Currently, people who create a character, or avatar, in one virtual world cannot take that identity into another service.
An open system would let people create one avatar that would keep the same basic appearance and customer data no matter where it was in cyberspace.
"It is going to happen anyway," said Colin Parris, IBM vice president of digital convergence. "If you think you are walled and secure, somebody will create something that's open and then people will drain themselves away as fast as possible."
You would think that IBM would have gotten the memo that Second Life is now un-hip, un-cool, and a corporate pariah. No really. When 9,000 employees in Italy are pissed off because IBM cut millions of dollars in bonuses and then pissed away millions of dollars on a drug-crazed nipple ranch, it should become very clear that Second Life is to be avoided like the plague.
I really can't wait for someone's SL avatar to show up in Toon Town or Club Penguin. Disney, which has always struggled with furry employees, is the last company that needs their games filled with overt sexual deviants. There are already sexual deviants in both mouse-controlled online worlds, they are just constrained by the limits of avatar creation. Wait until some 8-yr-old logs in and then asks his mom why the fox standing next to him has boobies and a pee pee.
