Second Life may be best known for its reputation as an anything-goes playground for the technoscenti, but more practical uses have long been proposed. An IBM employee who frequents SL reports that an associate (possibly another IBMer) has scripted a program that takes ‘complex system information’ and displays it as a three dimensional structure in the synthetic world, thus enabling visualisation of the interconnections in a complex software project, for example. We can expect to see more ideas like this crop up as people start to test the envelope of possibilities in a world that can be redesigned to suit any requirement.