I spent a lot of time hanging out with Miguel de Icaza and Jim Purbrick in the evenings. On Tuesday, I realized that Jim worked for Linden Lab. Now, you almost have to be living under a rock to not have heard of Second Life. However, even though I distinctly remember Robert Scoble describing Second Life as a computing platform, I totally didn’t get what that was about.
So I decided to ask Jim what the big deal was.
I started off by suggesting that I was way too old to ‘get’ what was going on in Second Life. Usually, when I see a 3D world, my first thought is OK, now who do I kill? However, Jim gave me this funny look like I was from some other planet and then proceeded to give me a demo of Second Life.
In his demo, he showed us how to create objects, and a bit of the Linden Scripting Language which is a programming language that you can use to control the virtual artifacts that you make in Second Life. Now that was kind of cool, but it wasn’t the hook that I needed to invest any serious amount of time in Second Life.
I finally ‘got it’ the next day when Cory Ondrejka, the CTO of Second Life, opened with an amazing talk that explained “Why?” in a way that even I could understand.
He discussed the social and economic implications of humans collaborating with each other inside of Second Life. Here is a quick summary of his talk:
- It is not a ‘game’, because games have objectives, winners and losers, ‘leveling’ etc.
- A virtual world where computing resources are represented by a land ‘proxy’. More land equals more CPU resources in Second Life.
- More land equals more money that you pay per month. This lets people pay for more power.
- Vibrant and growing internal economy – $1.3M USD exchanged hands in July.
- 140,000 residents in July sold 380,000 items
- You have intellectual property rights to things you create in Second Life. Case of Tringo which has been licensed for distribution in the ‘real world’.
- Whereas only 3% of web users have ever created any content, 65% of Second Life have created content. That translates into 36,000 hours of content creation per day. Currently that’s 23TB worth of user-created data.
- 15% of their users have written code in Linden Scripting Language.
- 350,000 residents in Second Life, growing at a rate of 15% per month.
- Median age of 32 years (there goes my ‘too old to get it’ argument).
- Gender neutral by hours of use.
The thing that really grabbed my attention was this photo:
It shows the Beyond Broadcast conference at the Berkman Center at Harvard both in real life and in Second Life. If you look closely at the MacBook Pro, you’ll see that there is a back-channel conversation that is going in real time. And, of course, most of the attendees in Second Life were not physically present at the real conference. Check out this link to see how they did this.
Now this is my hook to do something real with Second Life.
