Chat

Given many options for chatting to fellow students online, I wanted to try the virtual world ones as I'd heard so much about them. Time to dress up and get a life!

Unfortunately I didn’t like SL (Second Life) because it gave me untold grief after set up. My PC was not powerful enough and everything was jerky and slow, I didn’t feel like I needed the hassle. Looking at the system requirements for Entropia I figured my experience would have been much the same. 

I got the impression SL and Entropia were huge portals and that kind of put me off as well. Don’t get me wrong, in Real Life I love big cities and I know that virtual worlds can give me the opportunity to live and breathe something else. Virtually, I’d like to try a more personal sized small hick town with a general store, petrol station and a bowling alley serving charcoal chicken. And then be a part of dragging the entire town into the 21st century, being a human catalyst of sorts. Anyway… Next!

IMVU

• This virtual environment made chat and exploration of the limited ‘default’ world interesting. Visually it was ok but not as good as video or webcam. Chatting here was not too different from non-virtual applications such as Skype. IMVU offers a mix between the virtual and non-virtual experience. It is better for those who prefer to see more than just text in the chat but without engaging in visual cues too much. I liked it because even though this is real-time text chat, it's easy to use and lets me think about what I want to say and read in a conversation. But I am a fast touch typist so maybe the next person I chat with won’t agree that text-chat gives them time to think!

ICQ

• I installed ICQ but haven’t had the chance to chat with fellow students yet. I did however read about a privacy and possible security issue in AJ‘s blog where she mentioned ICQ loading all sorts of junk during installation. I cannot believe that some large and well known organisations still do this! During my own installation of ICQ I noticed a couple of boxes were ticked by default at the time of installing and I unticked them. ICQ will load a toolbar and become your default search engine if you don’t look carefully (and who does that!!). Most people just want to run the program but will end up getting quietly taken over by software like ICQ overriding any current settings. This is invasive if it is not adware or spyware grrr.
  

Oh how I could easily launch into a multi-page mollyrant and get lippy about our privacy and security online, but I won't today. The tactics that ICQ uses to brand (or whatever reason they have) by automatically replacing our search engine and installing yet another toolbar, is similar if not worse than Spam. I don't understand why they would need to use unsolicited marketing.

And my problems with Second Life - where I could have totally enjoyed their world but couldn't - leads me to think of a double whammy:

1. I need to make myself aware of the technical requirements to play some games... 
2. ...before downloading a weeks quota of ISP bandwidth.
   

 ‹/RANT!›