Thought for the day: For every Google, there's 5,000 guys with startups living in a cardboard box. On the other side, for every 5,000 guys with startups living in a cardboard box, there's a Google, which employs 10,000+. We come out on the plus, is what I'm saying.
Second Life is a Virtual World - THE VW, in fact, because the major competitor at the moment is OpenSim, and open source variant of, you guessed it, Second Life. In Second Life, you can fly. You can swim. You can build a car, a house, a boat. You can
be male, female, animal, human, robot, a creature made from crystals and light, all within about 5 minutes of each other. You can run a business using a real currency- the Linden Dollar($L). You can, and here's the kicker, exchange Lindens for USD, and vice versa. If you're particularly clever, you can make a living from Second Life.
For quite a while, Second life was the darling of the major Old Media. Corporations were FLOCKING to it. Reebok, Dell, they all set up digital storefronts. Everyone was convinced Second Life was the wave of the future, going to change the way we interacted with the Net.
And it flopped. Crashed. Businesses are shuttering all over SL. In 2011 they had about 1mil logins per month- in that same period, Facebook had 500mil. Why? Why did this supposed golden opportunity for business turn out to be nothing more than an, ahem, golden river?
Remember all those things you could be? Ask yourself honestly, now. If you can dress like Dracula, Dyonisus and Dianna Ross, are you really going to buy Abercrombie and Fitch? If you can be a mermaid, is Sketchers going to get your business? If you can fly by pressing and holding the Page Up key, what need have you for Volvo?
But, ah! Cast no stones just yet. There is a silver lining for Second Life. Corporate forays into Second Life flopped, but they were not the only ones who saw the immense potential in a virtual world. Educators, also, toyed with it. And SL is sooooo much kinder to Education than Commerce.
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| Princeton University's Second Life Campus |
Harvard is on Second Life, as are
several others.That last links to a case study of The New Media Consortium, a group which aims to help member organizations, including Harvard, Yale and MIT, use virtual worlds as much to their advantage as possible. There are even some organizations, like
Rockcliffe University, which are strictly virtual, having no real world campus whatsoever.
Rockcliffe's an odd example though. What it teaches, mostly, is virtual worlds; not just SL, though the primary campus is there, but also WoW, which comes under the heading of a game-type virtual world. On the other hand, the capstone classes for the various programs are, essentially, How To Apply What You Learned Here To The Real World. And, of course, it has courses teaching in media, specifically for First Responders type information. I have to admit, it seems like the best use of SL I've seen so far.
And of course beyond all that there's the recreational use of SL. I happen to have visited, among other places, a lovely Steampunk City, Paris in 1905, Konoha and Minas Tirith; because of this being the
Internet, there's also a lot of adult entertainment as well.
But that's not why I'm fascinated. Well, only No, my fascination is in the Linden Dollar. A truly virtual currency, which could be traded at will? It's a novel idea. We already exist in a digital world. How much do you own in virtual goods? All the data on your computer, in clouds on the Net, the games you play on Facebook. I own a lot more in virtual goods than I do in tangible goods. A digital currency might be exactly what the Internet needs.
And it has choices, too. The $L, of course, is bound to the USD. On the other hand, there's the
Ven, which aims to be an ACTUAL currency. The $L became what it is by accident; Linden Labs basically woke up one morning and said "HO SHIT! We accidentally made an economy!" Which, I suppose, is one of the reasons the Linden fails; they never really foresaw the full power of their product. They continually produce more Lindens on demand; this is a bad idea for the same reason the US Govt. doesn't simply print $16 trillion one-dollar bills and have a surplus.
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| The Ven |
But the Ven actually IS designed to be a real currency. And I think it could come to prosper, if it can get USE. Use, ultimately, is the life and death of an idea. How many of you had heard of the Ven before reading this? Despite the fact that it could be quite useful, how many of you will actually keep a stash of Ven in your Paypal?(actually, you wouldn't need to, but that's not the point) Most of you won't, is what I'm getting at. Or, maybe, a lot of us will. It depends. As my Thought said: for every 5000 failures, you get a Google.
Here's to being 5001.
Bill
But that's not why I'm fascinated. Well, only No, my fascination is in the Linden Dollar. A truly virtual currency, which could be traded at will? It's a novel idea. We already exist in a digital world. How much do you own in virtual goods? All the data on your computer, in clouds on the Net, the games you play on Facebook. I own a lot more in virtual goods than I do in tangible goods. A digital currency might be exactly what the Internet needs.
