The Creative Power of Second Life 50
Alice, over at Kotaku, has a post up looking at what Second Life means to the Web 2.0 crowd. Cory Ondrejka gave a presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference about what 2L is about, and dropped some interesting statistics on the audience. From the article: "Here's Cory's killer factoid, just announced here: Over 70% of Second Life residents have created an artifact - from scratch - in this past week. That's one crazy level of output. To give you a bit of perspective, that's approximately 23,000 human hours of play-work per day. Cory points out that this would cost Linden Labs over $400m a year to produce centrally, clearly not a viable business prospect. "
Created a what now? (Score:5, Insightful)
And how on Earth does he come up with the hour figure exactly?
99% of it is shit (Score:5, Insightful)
If only... (Score:4, Insightful)
Creative my ass (Score:1, Insightful)
Then, on page 2 of the registration process, after having already picked out a name and given an email address I find out they need a credit card number for 'age verification'. That is, if you are in a country that they cant send a verifying SMS message to a mobile, as was my situation.
The only other industry I have seen 'free' accounts need age verification via CC for is porn. This is also notorious for its fraud and infiltration by organised criminal syndicates. Suffice it to say that it will be a cold day in hell before my CC details are given to this MMOG - like porn, the best can be had for free.
And thus the great Second Life experiment came to an end. Hmmph.
Re:Creative my ass (Score:2, Insightful)
Say you're a member of a club, one that has a physical building (health club, Elks club, whatever). You can do and say a lot of things inside that building. But not very many such places would let you paint graffiti on the walls, even if they could clean it off easily. Second Life doesn't want graffiti on their walls.
Also, Linden Labs is trying to make a profit. If you have a griefer (who pays one membership fee to be there) wandering around annoying people, and his/her actions cause two other people to quit or not buy in after a trial membership, Linden's net profits are reduced. Second Life isn't life, it's a business.