Faasen Fasten up for a Second Life

This mostly appeared in 3pointD as I've been unable to post for a few days due to a hiatus described above - so despite the official date on this, it was not released into the wild until 4th June.

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With thousands of islands to choose from, you would think finding something new would be easy. Not so. Most islands are either given over to SL resident plots or are blocked to ramblers - or sometimes, both. Tonight I, once again, spent ages trawling for something I thought sufficiently worthy of blogging - and eventually I think I found it.

It may come as no surprise to regular readers of my blog to hear that this is another Dutch site, this time belonging to Faasen & Partners. According to the notecard supplied: "Faasen & Partners is a fast-growing young law firm and civil law notaries office in The Netherlands with offices in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. We have a specialization in corporate and employment law and distinguish ourselves from other law firms by our entrepreneurial way of thinking. "

I've not visited many law firms in Second Life but I guess their sites are likely to have the same facilities as most other company sites. Certainly all the features one would expect are here: a movie about the company; an auditorium for presentations; a number of areas for formal meetings and some informal chat zones. Oh, and of course a freebie: here in the form of a scuba diving kit, which makes a nice change from T-shirts.


The site is split into 3 main islands. One contains the main office block, while the others house the auditorium and an information portal (for want of a better word) with links to relevant pages of the company website. Yachts cruise between the islands, giving you infomation in both Dutch and English about the company and its presence.

The build does not appear to come from any of the big companies as far as I can tell. However, the build quality is excellent, with fine use of textures giving a highly polished, professional result. Whether this experiment will pay off for the company, only time will tell. However, it seems to be a trait of the Dutch to take chances and get in among the early adopters. I have to say, I was very impressed with it.

There has been a mini-flurry of exchanges on 3pointd about the possible builders. Faves at the time of writing are Dutch firm DNBmedia - and this confirms it.

PS: It's good to be back after my scare with the spy-bots of Blogger.