Librarians in Second Life--of course!
MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter are doomed - PC Magazine article
MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter are doomed
by Lance Ulanoff
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2145408,00.asp
Well, I read the article and while I agree with some of Ulanoff's descriptions of the services, I think his conclusions are way off the mark--especially in the case of Second Life:
...Second Life could just as easily be the first to go. No one believes its reported participation numbers anymore, even though big companies, such as Circuit City and IBM, have built virtual stores (and Playboy is jumping in with both, er, feet this month). Some individuals are even claiming to make real-world money in there, but are they really? Frankly, I think Second Life is the equivalent of a virtual con. There's no doubt that it's enjoyed startling growth in the last year and a half, but that was driven, for the most part, by the laudatory press and media coverage it received. Companies herded like sheep to the platform, because they believed the hype. So did users. But reality is finally starting to trump perception. Companies' virtual stores sit empty, and there's no way they can measure if they're building any additional brand recognition simply by being there.
Perhaps oddly, I was reminded of the very early days of the various Internet services, specifically AOL/America Online and the relatively splashy presence that the ABC television network had built there. Well, there were no rules so what was done was what was possible yet familiar--I still remember my aunt being thrilled that she was able to download publicity photos of her favorite cast members from the soap, "All My Children;" ABC had provided an honest-to-goodness archive of photos of cast members from the earliest days of the show, including the 1980s heyday, and my aunt prized her photo of Jenny, Greg, and Jesse (Kim Delaney, Laurence Lau, and Darnell Williams) printed on her very own color printer! That's where ABC started--using the new delivery system, the Internet, to send out cast photos. That may seem small and inconsequential and a waste of time and resources, but they certainly moved on from there! These days ABC has its own web site that delivers entire episodes of their TV series, podcasts, and yes, cast photos!
Second Life is an especially new and different delivery system, and I think that companies and everyone else are still figuring out how to use it and what to use it for. They are trying. There's always going to be someones who label such things as wastes of time, that because it's a concept and execution that's still relatively unformed, that it's silly and small and inconsequential and certainly won't last.
And they're almost always spectacularly wrong.
by Lance Ulanoff
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2145408,00.asp
Well, I read the article and while I agree with some of Ulanoff's descriptions of the services, I think his conclusions are way off the mark--especially in the case of Second Life:
...Second Life could just as easily be the first to go. No one believes its reported participation numbers anymore, even though big companies, such as Circuit City and IBM, have built virtual stores (and Playboy is jumping in with both, er, feet this month). Some individuals are even claiming to make real-world money in there, but are they really? Frankly, I think Second Life is the equivalent of a virtual con. There's no doubt that it's enjoyed startling growth in the last year and a half, but that was driven, for the most part, by the laudatory press and media coverage it received. Companies herded like sheep to the platform, because they believed the hype. So did users. But reality is finally starting to trump perception. Companies' virtual stores sit empty, and there's no way they can measure if they're building any additional brand recognition simply by being there.
Perhaps oddly, I was reminded of the very early days of the various Internet services, specifically AOL/America Online and the relatively splashy presence that the ABC television network had built there. Well, there were no rules so what was done was what was possible yet familiar--I still remember my aunt being thrilled that she was able to download publicity photos of her favorite cast members from the soap, "All My Children;" ABC had provided an honest-to-goodness archive of photos of cast members from the earliest days of the show, including the 1980s heyday, and my aunt prized her photo of Jenny, Greg, and Jesse (Kim Delaney, Laurence Lau, and Darnell Williams) printed on her very own color printer! That's where ABC started--using the new delivery system, the Internet, to send out cast photos. That may seem small and inconsequential and a waste of time and resources, but they certainly moved on from there! These days ABC has its own web site that delivers entire episodes of their TV series, podcasts, and yes, cast photos!
Second Life is an especially new and different delivery system, and I think that companies and everyone else are still figuring out how to use it and what to use it for. They are trying. There's always going to be someones who label such things as wastes of time, that because it's a concept and execution that's still relatively unformed, that it's silly and small and inconsequential and certainly won't last.
And they're almost always spectacularly wrong.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Tom Bruno on
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"Don't get too attached to MySpace. You might want to pull up stakes from Second Life, too. And you'll probably want to stop posting inanities to Twitter. Why? All of these sites will be gone before the end of this decade."
I'd honestly be surprised if any of these services existed as such by 2010 as well, not because of Ulanoff's dismissive and somewhat cliched reasons ("MySpace is ugly!" / "Twitter is inane!" / "Second Life is overhyped!"), but due to the fact that three years is an awful lot of time in Web 2.0 land and I fully expect these and other services to have evolved significantly enough by then into something that synthesizes these three distinct approaches to social networking.
I think a far better guess of where this is all going is offered by Wade Roush's excellent article "Second Earth" in the latest issue of Technology Review. Whereas companies like Google and Linden Labs have laid some interesting groundwork for the next decade of online innovation, the future seems to point in the direction of making all of these parallel metaverses talk to one another in a grand mash-up that will take these ideas across platforms and provide the protocols for a 3-D Web.
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Permalink Reply by Ann Owens on
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... and then we can all be wizards in the Emerald City, and live life vicariously through the actions of our avatars ... This Glasbergen cartoon really resonated with me after my clumsy experiences trying to manage my avatar in SL.
I agree that Second LIfe is a lab. The lessons learned in SL will certainly be used to create innovative Real Life, "traditional" online, and virtual world experiences that simulate person2person interactions. Virtual spaces are now a part of our culture - cultural literacy - and we will be expected to recognize the allusions and illusions if we are to remain credible.
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Permalink Reply by ALALibraryVal Miles on -
Tom, I definitely agree with your take, that one day they'll all talk to each other. Thanks for the link to the article!
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Valerie,
It may be happening sooner rather than later - I found this on Metaversed (a great resource for news on virtual worlds):
"A New York company has announced the launching of The Metacrasher Project in an effort to allow a wide variety of web technolgies to interact with each other.
The Metacrasher Project is a 3 phase project to initiate the connecting of all virtual worlds for commerce, content development, software development, by the creation of large networks of p2p and 3d web spaces that will communicate with the growing number of virtual worlds, MMOPG and any other kind of digital social network.
Phase 1 involves the creation of the quarterly MetaCrasher Magazine, a listing of 3D virtual spaces "which act as windows and portals to advertisers virtual spaces, products and services." The magazine will have both print and online formats.
Phase 2 is a peer-to-peer network to share a variety of tools, the first being a basic 3D renderer. This is due to launch later this month. Phase 3, a 3D virtual environment that acts as a portal to other 3D virtual environments, is due to become available at an undetermined date in the future."
Wow!
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Permalink Reply by ALALibraryVal Miles on
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MetaCrasher, indeed! A magazine? A peer-to-peer that will be ready later this month?? Wow!
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