SecondLife (or SL for short) is definitely a love/hate kind of virtual environment. Literally just about anything you can imagine you can find in full 3D glory in SecondLife. That can be something cool like a Kansas wheat field, or the Eiffel Tower or something more on the fringe of society like PonyGirls, or Gor. Many people come to SecondLife for a few days and decide it is a waste of time, blog about it, and completely miss the better parts of the environment.
This is further complicated by the owners at Linden Lab don't seem to really get the utility of their own product. It's utility as a business prototyping environment got tossed because it was positioned as a way to reach a lot of people which is not really accurate because it has scaling issues for number of "agents" (or avatar or resident) They also won't give up the free to play, which keeps the population and resources of the program tied up with folks who bring no buying power to the world . That's not a bad thing in and of itself, the problem comes in when the free account is a "bot" (a humanless avatar) that is there using resource to artificially boost a place's ratings.
The biggest mistake of all that Linden Labs is making is that they did not position SecondLife as social media when social media became the "catch phrase" of Web bloggers elite. There really is no more social Internet program than SecondLife.
In Facebook, you can write on someone's walls. In SecondLife you can take them to a live music concert, buy them a virtual pizza, and then go back to your place for a chat or a voice conversation. On Facebook you can find your existing friends, in SecondLife you can make completely new friends from all over the globe. On Facebook you can make plans to go horseback riding or sailing that requires gasoline powered travel in the real world, while in SecondLife you can instantly teleport to the ocean and hop in the boat and off you go.
Finally, on Facebook if you say something wrong you could upset a real nutjob who has probably enough information to find you and make you miserable. In SecondLife your real identity is disintermediated and you can do and say what you like with a reasonable assurance there will be no real-life downside.
SecondLife has no more of a learning curve than Facebook, and even though it requires the installation of separate viewer - it's simple enough. If you make connections with the right people and show a little respect, you will find lots of folks ready to help you get on your feet inside the world.
The downside of SecondLife is you need to be careful and go slow. The identity disintermediation that frees you to express yourself without repercussions, also allows the less savory folks to engage in predatory behavior. Put simply, the metaverse, just like the universe, has it's share of metajerks. So if you know going it to take everything you hear with a very large grain of salt you should be fine.
So knowing that Linden Labs should have positioned SecondLife as social media and didn't what prescriptive steps could they take?
1. Update the webbased profiles of SL residents to have more Facebookish/MySpacey features like the ability to add friends, comments, notes, and links to Google calendaring.
2. Contact the folks at Flock (the social web browser) and work out a way to include your SecondLife identity in the people section. Many, many residents also use Flickr and Youtube so intersecting them through Flock will give SL broader exposure and communicate some of the depth of the experience.
3. Start calling SecondLife social media. Just like Howard Stern declared himself "the king of all media" and it stuck, SecondLife needs to take the first step and declare itself social media or at least virtual social media.
4. Play to your limits. The fact that there is roughly a 100 avatar limit in sims (shorthand for "simulator" - a plot of virtual land) doesn't have to be a scaling handicap in a social environment. Focus on marketing to smaller groups with a common interest, i.e. a social network.
5. Make the support system more open, allowing residents to read complaints and respond/vote for them. There is an obtuse system now that only the hardcore users understand and it does not include complaints about residents. Make the police blotter more visible so other residents can be more informed and be better armed to deal with the handful of megajerks that are souring the soup.
6. Finally, with increased success, it becomes very important to consider limiting access for the free accounts. Whether this means log time limits, or travel restrictions, the time has come to consider putting restraints on the free accounts especially considering many of them are nothing more than bots - a humanless avatar that is there merely to raise a parcels ratings or collect camping money.
SecondLife like almost everything has the power to be something really realy good or something really really bad but the good that it does I believe as a going on 3 year resident far outweighs the bad. I want to see SecondLife continue to succeed. In that time I have developed deep friendships with people who, though I have never met in flesh and blood, are very "real" to me.
Positioning, or more accurately recognizing, SecondLife as viable social media could be key to regrowing the success that has faded since real world businesses have left SL.
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