SL Versus Kaneva: No Contest

I guess I’ll have to have an in-depth chat with fellow VTOR blogger WeirdHarold to understand what’s so great about Kaneva. Last week, when SL wouldn’t let in my partner, Jarod Styrian, no matter which alt he tried, we decided to explore it. Well, after the massive download, and logging in, and finding each other in our little studio apartments, and laughing at how we walk by scuttling around like cockroaches, our attitude was “what’s so great about it?”

Okay, it’s probably not fair that we judge Kaneva based on a couple days of exploring. And we all know SL is not only imperfect but seriously flawed in some respects. But, honestly I couldn’t scuttle out of there fast enough any of the times I was in Kaneva playing around. The interface is even more basic and clunky than the Pajama Sam computer games my son used to play on our ancient iMac. The avies are ugly, and you have to pay to buy enhancements. In fact, you have to pay to do just about everything in Kaneva, it seems.

In SL, by comparison, you can have a really nice life without paying a cent with all of the freebies that are out there for the taking if you explore just a little. Yes, Kaneva gives you a studio apartment with a TV, but you have to buy everything to fix it up. If that sounds petty, so be it. Oh, and I was in Kaneva for 32 minutes, and guess what? Yes! It crashed! Harder than the typical SL crash, too.

Why am I comparing the two? Because the Gartner Group report bashing SL as a place for doing business completely missed a major point when it said Kaneva offered a better environment for companies looking to invest in a virtual world. If a company’s sim or SL site fails, it’s not the community that’s to blame, it’s the company for failing to understand how the operation works and to police it accordingly. Business did this first with Web sites, and then with email. Smart companies figure out how to adapt to the new technology,which often has a reality that’s far different from the one the company’s marketing geniuses exist in. Clueless ones pulled out and blamed the technology.

I think I’ll just go out to the hammock on our island property, rez a margarita and toast you all and the weekend. TGIF!