Second Life: 4 Years Later

I've been reading a lot of negative articles about the Second Life (SL) platform lately and it all boils down to this: the news of virtual world demise has been greatly exaggerated by media.

While the real world is facing some pretty tough economic times, virtual worlds are flourishing in ways no one can fully predict or imagine. There are at least two things I'm fully certain of:

• Virtual worlds are ever more relevant as means of artistic expression, and
  
• Virtual worlds are quickly becoming rich cultural contexts for kids.

My 2 cents on marketing application of SL/virtual worlds:
Bad or good, the companies who tried to make sense of the virtual space have enough material (from their own experiences or the experiences of others) to learn some very important lessons, if they choose to do so. Now that the hype is off, it comes down to a very simple choice: if your brand want to reach the unique demographic type of people who hang out in these worlds; if the brand has something meaningful to share with these folks and isn't obnoxious about it, then by all means, it's worth a shot. It always has.

As far as my personal experience is concerned, I created my first Second Life account about 4 years ago. These days, however, I hardly spend a couple of hours/week there. I keep in touch with what happens by reading a select number of blogs, flickr, and logging in when I see content that is unique/different. My favorite activities are still exploring the world (teleporting to random places), attending live music events (Grace McDunnough rocks), and seeing amazing artwork coming to life.

There are also a select number of education and health communities thriving, now that the eyes of the world aren't so focused on them.
Education and health has always had its own rhythm of doing things, exploring, or jumping head-first. Not all of these applications will be successful either, but some are really good uses that will continue to live among the diverse SL world as a sort of quiet hero. They will slowly and steadily help people in a myriad of ways. And we will likely never read about this in the papers.

Really, Second Life is like Apple's first generation iPod.
In the end, SL is like Apple's first ... anything. Stuff doesn't fully work as it should, but it's new tech that's shiny and new. And you want it.

However, as users get increasingly savvy about the product, the technology is "at risk" for improvement, whether this comes from in-house or from another company. Unless Linden Lab can work to create a better virtual world architecture from ground-up and unless the company acquires some common sense in governing their community, there will be a shift down the line towards something like SL, only better. It's just natural progression.

We don't know what roles these worlds will play in our daily lives, how they will develop over time, or if they will be called Second Life, but they will be around. The most important reason? Kids are growing up on them. And kids have this nasty habit of becoming adults sometimes :)