Back in August, when I started investigating it for the first time, I
wrote about Second Life, the (for now) runaway winner in an emerging niche of online 3-D virtual worlds that are not (according to their publishers) games. It's high time for an update on what I've discovered in the six months since.
Second Life's greatest utility, to me, is that it better mimics the experience of being offline in the same room together than any other online medium... The experience of interacting there is vastly more social and immersive than, say, an online blogging community. High trust relationships are built quickly.... Therefore, I think it is destined to become an important new platform for online organizing / community building / social networking.
Think Meetup, except that you don't need 40 people to be in the same place on the planet to have an effective Meetup. Therefore a niche group-- let's say "Doctors for Tax Justice" can achieve critical mass to "meet" and form an action-oriented community for readily than if they needed 40 Doctors For Tax Justice in San Francisco. In this vein, we run RootsCamp in Second Life every week.
Think of a conference like YearlyKos in Chicago this summer, in which ~1000 people will attend in person, but which we expect to sell out early... People who can't afford the time or the money to attend in Chicago, or who miss getting registered before we hit capacity, will be able to attend a concurrent "mixed-reality" YearlyKos conference that we will be running in Second Life, complete with Second-Life-only panels that we have insufficient space for in Chicago, streaming of the Chicago panels and keynotes, etc.
Think of a political campaign with staff around the country who need to trust each other and work closely together every day-- Cisco, IBM and many other Fortune 500 companies have already found that Second Life meeting environments can help their distributed teams work together-- and in some cases work directly with their clients-- more effectively than a combination of email, telephone, video conferencing, and airplanes for face to face meetings. That's why these companies are investing millions of dollars in researching and testing virtual worlds. We recently brought NASA into Second Life for the same reason.
Second Life is also a rich medium for content creation that can be "surfaced" to the Web for broader exposure... ~200 people participated in an anti-war "virtual march on virtual capital hill" that we organized between CodePink and RootsCamp in Second Life recently, and one of our volunteers made a video of the event that went mildly viral with over 50,000 views... The cost of creating it was $0.
Clearly Second Life is not a panacea for online organizing, and there is a great deal of hype... User base growth statistics of 30% per month and >$1 Million transacted between Second Life users every day are somewhat misleading, though the growth rate is torrid nonetheless. To hear Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus and the Chairman of Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) tell it, Second Life "promises to be disruptive… comparable to both the PC and the internet itself, which started as something “quirky” for geeks, and then entered and transformed mainstream society. Ultimately, Second Life will displace both desktop computing and other two-dimensional user interfaces. As a hothouse of innovation and experiment, Second Life may even accelerate the social evolution of humanity.”
Hype or not (and I'm actually not at all certain that it is- Mitch is smarter than I am), I do think we're seeing the early stages of a massive trend towards extensive use of immersive 3-D online environments as a primary medium for online social and professional online interaction with each other and with data that can be represented visually. There is already great utility for me and communities I am helping to build in the context of RootsCamp, NASA, and YearlyKos in Second Life, and I think it likely that the utility I experience today will prove to be just the tip of the iceberg, as Second Life's technology improves and as its user base grows.
1. R on February 22, 2007 3:07 PM writes...
I agree, the potential is there for exciting and novel interactions and is only beginning to be explored. There are some kinks they will have to work out first, though, before the big groups you mentioned can be a practical reality. My (admittedly limited) experience has been that when you have more than about 40 or so avatars in one area, problems with lag increase so that the refresh rate is usually very slow, and users may be told that the sim is full and find themselves shut out of that event.
Permalink to Comment2. Andrew Hoppin on February 22, 2007 5:38 PM writes...
Good points-- we're working on the capacity issue for YearlyKos in particular by:
1) Having multiple "mirrored" sims-- we'll have at least 4
2) Taking advantage of improving Second Life server infrastructure that will allow more avatars per sim
3) Using intelligent Second Life building techniques to keep the YearlyKos venue "clean" and minimize the chance of crashes
4) Requiring registration for the YearlyKosSL conference so that we limit the number of avatars who will be able to attend.
Permalink to Comment3. Casey on April 4, 2007 4:04 AM writes...
As you are aware, the world of industry such as Abn Amro, Philips, Adidas, Toyota and etceteras has discovered Second Life and organized press meetings to announce their presence in Second Life. Even universities and governments entered Second Life which suprises many.
However, what do you think if local municipal create its presence in Second Life? What are the implications, prospects and benefits for local municipal? Is it publicity that they are after, the momentary attention of the press, taking profit of the hype around Second Life, or are there more sustainable reasons that make such presence worthwhile from both governments and research perspectives?
How do you think Second Life can contribute towards the development of e-government?
I would like to hear your opinions in this context.
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