The nail on the head

A year ago, when Second Life became a hype, many companies went there as fast as they could, put up big impressive buildings - and then nothing happened. Some of them pulled out again, others evaluated the failures and learned some valuable lessons. As did Cisco:

It turned out people wanted to log on to Second Life to hang out with friends and play casual games, not visit a 3-D version of a corporate Web site.

....

“Two or three months in we bulldozed everything we’d done. It’s now a place for meetings (with customers and employees) rather than repurposed Web content,” Renaud said. “If I can have an intimate talk with 50 people a week, man, I’ve won the lottery.”

As they say.. read the whole thing. And learn from it ;-)