http://www.secondeffects.com/2007/10/why-rl-businesses-fail-in-second-life_17.html

And to Wagner/Hamlet, this was a brilliant article as it hits on all the key points that I also observe. And I must mention that Second Life is indeed “personally transformative”. I have witnessed myself profound changes in many virtual friends who have leveraged the virtual environment and anonymity to explore things about themselves and others they may never have been able to do in real life. And no, it’s not just about sex!

But I do worry about the human side of things. Some of my friends who are gamers have achieved the delicate real life vs. online life balance that I see as healthy. But too many get sucked into their virtual identities and lose touch with reality. Not to mention never going outdoors or having any physical human contact. How is this going to affect us in the long run?

Ultimately, though, I tend toward optimism. The future of online worlds seems pretty darn cool.

Apologies. That should be Intel; not IBM.

1. Market: Not sure what you definition of an online world is, but it’s certainly not limited to SL. My kid is on Webkinz, does that count?

2. Most successful: You said it yourself- not the most popular.

3. Embodiment: Again a point that makes sense, but is not anything to do with second life. I think of my text postings on a MUD as me too.

4. Dynamically blah blah: Check out Google Earth’s 3D Warehous…it’s certainly not a unique feature and is crucially not an open feature. I can’t host my own content. The winner in this market will be an aggregator of content from other companies, not just a host. Right now, SL is like Compuserv or AOL or Prodigy before the WWW.

5. Marketplace: I’m much more interested in a place like Threadless where you can design t-shirts and buy shirts designed by others than I am something where I can buy bits. It’s like charging someone to build their homepage…except it’s in a walled garden.

6. Personally Transformative: For how many users?

7. None of this means anything until you can connect worlds together. That is what you should be anticipating- a standard that allows worlds to be created by people other than Linden Labs. You know, like the Internet. The one most people actually like. In other words, Linden Labs/SL could be something like Prodigy or Compuserv, or an standard for virtual worlds could emerge and they could be the AOL.

The smart money is on building competing worlds to SL and pushing the standards that allow them to be connected.

Ask IBM. They’ve recently partnered with Croquet-based Qwaq to work on what looks to me like a PLM application – only combining 2D desktop applications with 3D virtual simulation applications (similar to what some other PLM vendors are reportedly doing). You don’t get much more sophisticated than that when it comes to productivity.

“My guess is most people…even the youngest among us will grow up to want to spend more time with people in-flesh, rather than in-world.”

I wonder if people living during the introduction of television made the same point.

In any case, the research I’ve seen indicates that it’s not a simple correlation; that more time socializing online necessarily equals less real-life social interaction. If anything, I’ve seen reports of just the opposite.

Yes, there are news stories citing examples of husbands who’d rather socialize online than… sit in front of television all evening with their wife (as opposed to the wife being willing to give up the teevee for something arguably more engaging). But like the ebb and flow of press hype cycles, it’s best to not put too much faith in what has been increasingly and demonstrably shoddy reporting in this area.

I suspect what people are neglecting is that the trade-off isn’t necessarily giving up RL social time for virtual activities, but perhaps rather giving up passive, non-social television viewing for virtual interactive social activities.

My guess is most people…even the youngest among us will grow up to want to spend more time with people in-flesh, rather than in-world. We’ll see. But no one can convince me a virtual burger tastes better than the real thing!

7 Reasons Why Second Life Should Matter For Biz Executives So, the brief answer: In a rapidly growing market of online world users, it’s the most successful example of an embodied, dynamically collaborative content creation platform that’s personal…

1 – requires download
2 – slower than dial-up
3 – 3D? haha, try slow-motion 3D
4 – gives motion sickness

There’s a lot of hype because it’s a virtual world, an idea that has fascinated people for decades. Second Life is the first to have some success, but in the long run it will be nuked by someone that comes along with a flash-based version, or something else that requires no download and runs reasonably fast.

You can make money in Second Life? Who cares. You can make money on eBay. Oh it’s fake digital stuff? People have been selling fake digital stuff (logos, websites, etc.) for more than a decade now. If you want to make money selling fake digital stuff, you’re probably better off with a website and a Google Adwords account.

Overall, the virtual world thing and these social network things all run up against The Wall. What’s that? It’s called 24 hours in a day, most of that devoted to sleep and labor. If you think the balance of that is going to be spent in a virtual world or on various social network sites, you have to be kidding me.

In 2-3 years, the trade headlines will be “Web Fatigue” and you’ll see new Luddites emerging. There’s only so much we want and can handle.