Having spent the better part of a Sunday trying to figure out how to move around and build in Facebook’s recent 3D virtual world application Cloud Party, I still have no idea what to make of it. I learned about Cloud Party earlier this week through the Second Life Educators Discussion (SLED) mailing list. Initial reports were that there were far more things right about it than were wrong.

Reading reports from SL educators Ellie and Iggy, encouraged me to look up the password for my rarely used Facebook account so I could experience Cloud Party first hand. My initial experiences there were similar to those noted by both reviewers in that I encountered a significant number of experienced Second Life builders.

At one point there were nearly two dozen avatars walking around and trying to learn how to use the building controls. Questions I typed in to text chat, such as how to jump or how to apply a texture to an object, were quickly answered in a cordial way by those who’d already figured it out. For jumping the answer was easy: press the space bar.

Uploading and applying a texture proved to much more difficult. Even with a useful forum section which addresses a wide range of topics, it took me several rounds of trial and error to finally reach a close approximation of what I was hoping to do.

As mentioned in the video made while doing another Google+ Hangout, I mentioned that it fels like this is going to be a very big deal. I intend to keep an eye this Cloud Party.