The more I read about Second Life the more I want to spend some time on it. The thing is, I am having enough issues with the real one I have. Is creating a second one an escape like a…

“I am the last person to disparage the networking opportunities from online communities that spring up around games or other forms of entertainment. I’ve been part of all kinds, and actually met my husband through the game that surrounded the release of Steven Spielberg’s A.I.. I’m part of a huge and high-profile World of Warcraft guild and have met lots of interesting and real-world successful people though it. Let no one doubt my online community networking cred. (Proud to be a nerd, yo.)

Like you, Julian, I’ll probably take another stab at it just so I can see what the buzz is about. But I just don’t get it…”

I think you’ve got a great point about how some companies are using SL. You’re right, I don’t want to just see the same old shit in SL that I could get on a web site. There should be something unique and entertaining (and useful) here. I think that a lot of this initial corporate content is from the knee jerk “I’ve got to be there” reactions companies are having to SL *OR* similar to web 1.0 when we first started putting up web sites and we all discovered that simply putting our same stuff online failed to leverage the power of the web. And while we’re on the topic of useful…If I was looking for a cool job and I can reach a hiring manager via SL that wouldn’t normally answer my e-mail or phone calls then SL gets *way* more interesting – really fast.

Interesting timing, just had a meeting here about SL. I’m intrigued by the possibilities for recruiting in SL in innovative ways, but not interested in being a part of SL myself, I have enough to keep me busy in my first life.

My humble opinion: So, SL is a fantasy world essentially where one can do things not possible in the real world right? i.e. flying. In looking at some of the sites that companies have put out there they are basically copies of what those companies have in the real world, Reuters has a news tower, each floor of which has different streaming news from their site, why wouldn’t I just go to the website to get that same content? American Apparel has a clothing store, again not much thrill or innovation there especially if I have to pay for a shirt in Linden dollars. Both in my opinion are uninteresting and not real innovative. More interesting would be to do something in second life that you can’t do in the real world. Why not use SL to test the response to something that would be too expensive to test in the real world? Like complicated campaigns or product ideas. Yeah, great I can go to all the IBM auditoriums across their 7 acres, but what can I really do there that’s interesting? Not much yet, so therefore I don’t see the value in it. Maybe the companies that are there will change and become more interesting in SL. I predict the real success in SL will come from companies using it to do things they can’t do in the real world, not just copying real world to virtual world.