Second Life Lessons

O “mundo baseado na web”, plataforma de redes sociais, muito mais do que um simples jogo, continua a dar números para pensar. Na realidade é uma plataforma de redes sociais com as comunidades virtuais online existentes desde o começo das redes (70-80-90), mas com diferenças fundamentais: dinheiro, business, empresas reais, eventos reais. Já se diz que em um futuro próximo compraremos livros, por exemplo, na Amazon a partir do Second Life com os nossos avatares…

Recentemente vi no blog do J. Ito, sua chamada para uma conferência da CNET News no Second Life: “When you arrive at the CNET building, you can fly up to the top floor through the open balcony on the right side of the building. Please come and join us for what is sure to be a fun and inspiring conversation.”

Abaixo um interessante artigo da Buseiness Week: Second Life Lessons:

“You may have heard the hype about popular 3D online universe Second Life, but setting up shop there presents unique challenges. For real-life companies from Warner Bros. (TWX) to Adidas (ADDDY) to Intel (INTC) seeking to brand themselves as hip and forward-thinking, virtual community Second Life has quickly become a trendy marketing and advertising outlet.

Opening virtual offices or shops, selling and market-testing digital replicas of products, and creating 3D online personas or ‘avatars’ in Second Life are becoming items on the to-do lists of those eager to tap into the nascent market. The three-year-old Web-based world has more than one million ‘residents’ who spent $9 million in October on virtual land, products, and services. And while advertising’s traditional outlets are losing eyeballs, so far this year the population of Second Life has increased 995% — a growing potential consumer audience for marketing messages.”

Estatísticas recentes:

Second Life citizenship grew 995% just this year.
Commerce, a more important statistic, rose to $9M, up 287% this year
The male/female split is close to even -57 to 43%
Finally, more than 55% of citizens hail from outside the US.

Outro artigo interessante está no The Guardian sobre a cópia de objetos que poderia colocar o “modelo de negócios” do mundo Second Life em perigo. Mas vejam esse trecho:

“A copy of a web page (or MP3 file) is anonymous, but copies of virtual objects in Second Life will be linked to the copier, and that link will be “immutable”. This is perhaps the biggest difference between Second Life and real life. In the real world, even the most efficient totalitarian regime has only an imperfect knowledge of its population’s activities. But the world of Second Life exists entirely within its computers. Linden Lab knows everything about everyone in its “world” – including who created copies. This makes policing abuse far easier in Second Life than in real life.

It also makes it simpler to punish. The company has stated that “anyone detected using Copybot maliciously to target individual Resident[s] or damage the community as a whole will be expelled from Second Life”. For “expel” read “delete”.

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