Second Life
I would love to start a dialogue about the next generation of social networking and more – Second Life
For those not familiar with the site, Second Life is a 3-D virtual world built and owned by its residents. It inhabits over a million people from around the globe.
The Wikipedia definition of Second Life is “a privately owned, partly subscription-based 3-D virtual world, made publicly available by San Francisco based Linden Lab, and founded by former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale. The SL world resides in a large array of servers that are owned and maintained by Linden Lab, known collectively as “the grid”. The SL client program provides its users with tools to view and modify the SL world and participate in its virtual economy, which concurrently has begun to operate as a “real” market. At precisely 8:05 AM PDT, October 18th, 2006, the population of SL hit 1 million residents”.
Second Life is not just for networking. There is also a strong e-commerce aspect.
I just read today in www.dmnews.com that both Sears and IBM have opened shop in Second Life. Sears created a virtual “room” where consumers can interact with Sears products. There are at least 3,000 entrepreneurs making $20,000 or more a year on Second Life businesses. BusinessWeek recently devoted a cover story to Anshe Chung, Second Life’s largest real-estate mogul.
Companies have also been created to take people through Second Life virtual “tours”. Admittedly, mine is scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. I would love to hear your thoughts on the Second Life virtual world. What are your predictions? Personally, I think we as marketers need to get on board. Companies have already lost control of their brands to consumers. If we don’t play in their world, our brands will die the way of the Dodo.
