I installed Second Life today. The point was to catch Guy Kawasaki’s keynote address at the Engage | Invest | Exploit 2009 event in Edinburgh. Admirably the event organiser’s were planning on simulcasting Guy Kawasaki’s presentation through a Window’s Media stream and also through some kind of Second Life magic.

I was particularly interested in catching the talk as couldn’t attend personally. A month previously I’d been told over email by an Edinburgh Uni staffer that my own, reasonably innovative, data-portability startup was “bit early stage to exhibit”.

But then, just as I’d put the finishing touches on my avatars outfit and the keynote was starting, oh no it’s…

The Guy Kawasaki Streaming FAIL

Things didn’t start well, and didn’t get much better as time went on. At no stage during the duration of talk, in either the Second Life thinger or Windows Media stream, was I able to see any video at all. Although I did catch a few seconds of stuttering audio from the intro.

At this point I’ll hazard a guess and suggest that the demand for streams outstripped the capacity to serve them and at some point things got a bit hot and sticky on the Edinburgh Uni network.

But I really did care about the content I was trying to reach and first tried to reload the stream, then Second Life, then restarted my Mac. No dice after all the effort though, they stream was unavailable.

First Impressions Matter

Availability is important. If your a web start-up and have designed a great user experience you have to ensure that your service stays up when it matters. You cannot allow the effort you’ve put into product UX to go down the pan and allow actual first experiences be of service unavailable messages.

It’s disappointing that an event, with serious university iron and tubes, which aims to nurture start-up innovation can fall prey to what should be trivial capacity issues before it’s off moved off the starting block.

Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail

You have to feel that eyes were taken off balls.

I’d like to know what kind of planning was performed in preparation for the streaming event, and if any of the following questions were asked:

• How may connections can our in-house systems handle?
• How many of Guy Kawasaki’s followers will attempt to view the feed when he tweets about walking on stage to give a talk?
• Does the number of Second Life users expected warrant the effort required to set-up streaming for that platform, or should we invest more time and money in our web streaming efforts?
• What free or commercial streaming services could we use to offset the load on our own systems?
• If one streams go down are there backups?

Conversation on twitter is happening right now with the #eie09 hashtag.