June 23rd will be Second Lifes 3rd birthday, and finally Second Life seems to be gaining traction in the marketplace of ideas. More importantly (for its financial viability), it's starting to gain the attention of businesses....

Micropersuasion noted yesterday that American Apparel has opened a store there. And in September last year, Wells Fargo bought an island, and created an educational game.

It's Not A Game

What is Second Life? Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by over 200,000 people from around the globe.

MIcropersuasion's Steve Rubel is lumping this into the category of "Advergaming," as has the Times (UK). On the surface, it may seem similar to Nokia putting billboards in Splinter Cell. But Second Life is not, by any means, a video game. Marketers are clearly still trying to figure out what Second Life is for, whether it be product placement, or avatar-based marketing. Business Week seems to grok that this is beyond advertising:

...some unholy offspring of the movie The Matrix, the social networking site MySpace.com, and the online marketplace eBay. And it was growing like crazy, from 20,000 people a year ago to 170,000 today.

MySpace killer?

The Co-Creative Business

SecondLIfe is actually more akin to the internet than it is a game. Buying land in Second Life is equivalent to buying a Web server (buying an island is like buying a huge server), building things with the 3d tools and scripting them with LSL (Linden Scripting Language) is equivalent to building Web sites.

Like the internet, it is an endlessly "co-creative" environment, with a rich, user accessible scripting language. etc. What American Apparel has done here is the equivalent of creating a Web site. To kind of support the co-creative meme, it turns out the creation of the American Apparel store creation was headed up by a SecondLife resident, Amy Weber, and she actually worked with the American Apparel architects for floorplans and layouts (see a related article from Clickable Culture.

The Foundation of Trust

Now, the comparison to the internet holds well up to a point: the major difference is ownership of the infrastructure. The 3d world of Second Life is owned by one company, and that represents a risk that needs to be considered, especially for companies that want to invest heavily in building amazing destinations. The company right now, lindenlabs is very independent, transparent, and social-media centric. They seem genuinely interested in building an open environment with as few controls as possible, demonstrated by this transcript of one of their town hall meetings.

My question is how do they guarantee that for the future? Trust is the fundamental foundation of a co-creative relationship, and they need to continue building that.

Usability & Autonomy

As it turns out building things in Second Life is actually amazingly accessible. I built an object and attached some scripting behaviors to it so it would say hi to people that approached it, and I even gave it a price so people could buy it if they were that inclined. You can also integrate somewhat with the real internet, because objects/land/locations can have SURLs (Second Life URLs) that you can put in regular Web pages. In fact, someone that left a comment on my post about the Second Life t-shirt give away left a SURL for me to follow.

So what next?

Well its early days with 250,000 members, but it's worth checking out, basic membership is free so you should check it out. As for me I think I'm going to save up some money, buy some land and build a casino. And hey, no stealing my idea Mr Trump :-)

Call For Participation

Thanks,

Karl Berry (my secondlife name)

Resources:

New World Notes - Wagner James Au Reports first hand from Second Life

LSL Scripting wiki

(BTW I've borrowed heavily from and I highly recommend CC Chapmans podcast "managing the grey" where he gives a secondlife primer )

SecondLife History Wiki

Related:
Customer Experience for a co-creative business