Convoluted Communication
Yesterday, I had a brief conversation with someone via IM. Nothing unusual, just an inquiry about the possibility of purchasing a copy of the SkyLounge tower. (No! It's mine! All mine!) Been getting quite a few IMs about the tower lately. Makes me wonder if there was something that caused a shift in SL building tastes. Sure, now that Havok 4 is on the verge of truncating it at 1024 meters, everyone gets interested. Story of my Second Life.

Anyway, after the conversation, something occurred to me. I was answering it via IM-to-email. So was the other party, via his iPhone (according to the little "sent from my iPhone" tag appended to a couple of his IMs). I receive an IM (presumably initiated from within SL just before logout), relayed to my GMail account. This, in turn, was relayed to my work address. I replied to said IM with an email, which was sent via GMail back to Second Life, where it was sent by internal instant message to the other party. Apparently, he had logged out by then (unsurprising, given the minutes-long delays sometimes introduced by IM-to-email), so the IM was sent to him by whatever channels he uses (at least one relay from his email account to his iPhone). He responded, and the IM was relayed back to me through the same channels, in reverse. Repeat a couple more times.

So, thanks to at least five different telecommunications services, not to mention the dozens of intermediate internet stops along the way, we were able to conduct a simple conversation about a giant tower that doesn't actually exist. Ah, welcome to the information age.
Posted by Moriash Moreau at 11:54 AM