Second Life’s grid shut downs, glitches, bugs, teleport failures and general crashes is frustrating for residents and can be a disaster for education or companies who need assurance that if they’re planning an event that all will go according to plan – or if not by plan, at least the grid will be where it’s supposed to be.

Recently, the Immersive Education group made a move to shift discussions of virtual worlds for education off Second Life onto privately hosted servers, or to at least insure multiple redundancy. As they outlined in their e-mail to the immersive ed community:

These will happen using all 3 of our Immersive Education platforms (Wonderland, the open source Second Life viewer, and Cobalt/Croquet). For a period of time we’ll continue to have some meetings in Second Life on the Linden Labs servers because the Education Grid servers are very early stage and under active development, but over time we’ll transition entirely to the Education Grid where we’ll have backup (failover) servers on different network segments and hosted by different universities.

While Linden Lab has acknowledged that the brands came too early, or came with expectations that were too high, they’ve also been touting that in the absence of Nike or AOL the next wave of development is in education and business collaboration. But the New Media Consortium is making an effort to move off into Wonderland. An immersive ed “think tank” is, well, rethinking what platform makes the most sense just to TALK about virtual worlds.

The need for far more progress on stability in Second Life is becoming painfully obvious not just to residents, but to education groups who can’t rely on a commercial platform where there’s been a lot of TALK about improving performance but where progress has been slow at best.