My initial reaction is gushy — love the interface (clean, techy, uncluttered), love the graphics, and LOOOVE the ability to share media. Video play from sites like YouTube allow you to go full screen or to play in context of the world.

Whether video will now be synchronous or not for multiple avatars I’m not sure – but web pages are, which provides some wonderful opportunities to supplement in-world content with 2D content.

As far as collaborative documents go, I was able to get to the menu of my Google Documents but wasn’t able to open a document. I could see the Loading message happen at the top of the page, but no dice. I had better luck with using Etherpad.  I mapped an Etherpad URL to a prim in Second Life and was able to chat to people using EtherPad from within Second Life and was able to co-author a document with them.  Those not using the new browser will only see a grey prim – and I noticed that prims with videos that work in the old browser didn’t work for me.

Am looking forward to further experiments and to reading the experiments from others on this.

I was just about to look into rigging it for OpenSim so that I could check out ImmersED Estate when I got this link to a cautionary post from the OpenSim community - http://justincc.org/blog/2010/02/25/a-word-of-caution-when-trying-second-life-viewer-2-beta-with-current-opensim/ about the fact it doesn’t communicate well with OpenSim asset servers and could result in the loss of inventory items –  so I will use it with a test account only.

Cheers!

KerryJ