iVillage Second Life Tour Descends Into Chaos

iVillage's first Girl's Night Out sounded great. Join us for virtual champagne, they said, "and an exclusive insider tour to showcase the great locations, personalities, music and content” in Second Life - and a pink HUD to wear to lead us through the various attractions.

But Girl's Night Out quickly descended into chaos, with a swarm of avatars trying to get to the first spot, which was full, as was the second, and who knows about the third because an hour had been eaten by that time and I had to go.

I did hear a great concert at the iVillage loft, and a couple of people were really, really kind and helpful. Thanks!

iVillage needs to have tour guides, lots of them, and make a much better plan for the next Girl's Night Out. And they ought to send a list of the attractions in advance to avoid pandemonium. As for the promise that Ariana Huffington would be there: well, who knows.

Most SL areas can only accomodate 40 residents at a time, so iVillage probably needs to create many small groups and set a time frame for how long each group will stay in each SIM or the same mess will happen when they do the next one in two weeks.

I had to laugh that in the midst of the chaos two residents were carrying on inane cocktail party chat that sounded like a therapy session. Maybe they had too much virtual champagne. Me, I couldn't find the fucking pink champagne flute for the first half hour. Sigh.

Jack Linden has a write-up at Second Life Herald

B.L., the Herald story was by our Editrix, Pixeleen Mistral. Jack Linden was just another Linden in drag. :-)

Hi there,
Well, I have to agree - we had such a huge influx of tour participants that we simply weren't prepared for the interest. Its a double edged sword in SL - do you want too little to show up or too many? (I blogged a little bit on that thought but I'll spare you that here.)

I'd like to apologize personally for the confusion, any time you try something out for the first time there's going to be lessons learned to make the next time go smoother. Multiple guides and suggestions like setting up the tour in separate groups are exactly the kinds of things we also took from the night, and we're brainstorming on how to easily implement something like that for future tours, especially when residents start organizing their own.

I personally didn't know about Ariana showing up until people started asking me about her - I believe she was there at the beginning of the night before the tour got underway. That falls under the better communication list of fixes I think - I'd like to utilize the iVillage tour blog better with links to locations, etc ahead of time so people that miss out on the HUD (we're also working on ways to make that easier to use and find) can reference the blog to find out what's on the list of tour locations.

Thanks again for coming, and please know we're taking lessons from the launch of the iVillage tours to try our best to make them enjoyable for everyone. I hope I see you at the next one!