Second Life Revisited

Earlier I told you about Second Life, the next big thing in online networking and communication. Meanwhile I had a chance to further check it out and to get some background of the growing pains of this hype.

The word ‘hype’ always had a negative sound, but I can assure you that Second Life will not give you a negative experience provided you have some patience to learn the tricks to ‘live’ your second life and if you are prepared to indulge some electronic traffic jams from time to time.

Since I last wrote about it I discovered strange and new worlds, fully built by the creative minds of Second Life users.

When you start at Second Life you are transported to a learning island where you can find out how to move and make objects. Most of us forget that instantly, but once you are admitted to the mainland you’ll notice that there is a lively trade going on in Second Life objects. You name it and you can buy it there - from clothes to shoes to cars and houses.

The first Second Life millionaire (yes, they exist) user had a gift for buying land, pimping it with palm-trees and beaches and selling it with a large profit. Now there are tens of people (54 by the latest count according to the official Second Life blog) who are making more then 5000$ per month selling objects in Second Life.

They all add to a better Secondlife experience, so much so that the people from Linden Labs have a really hard time keeping up with their popularity. I have spoken to a few Secondlife ‘old-timers’ who informed me that the environment is currently running on 4100 servers. Imagine 4100 servers in order to just keep an average of 10,000 simultaneously online users ‘alive’. That is just 2.3 users per server!

In just 2 months, the total number of users has increased from 1.5 to 2.2 million users. So it is easy to see that there has to be some serious investment going on by large investors. And guess what, I have found them for you. There are large pieces of land and islands under construction wearing the names of big companies. I knew there was a ABN-AMRO bank property which was not accessible for me (it is a private island), but flying around there, trying to find my way in I noticed a ABN-AMRO 2, 3 and 4 island in the makings!

A few large investor names that drew my attention: Nissan, Toyota (they has Second Life test-drives of new upcoming models for you ready), Nike (they sell shoes in a Nike store), Sony-Universal Music Group (large island with celebrity offices) and MTV has its Laguna Beach, which is one of my favorite SL hide-outs.

Meanwhile I learned some tricks to get a better SL experience: I noticed that there are Same Interest Groups popping up on SL, some with their own property. One of these groups was a ABN-AMRO group and once I joined that group, I was able to move into the ABN-AMRO island which was off limits for me before. I was glad I did because I instantly noticed the difference with the rest of SL I knew: it was much more stable! On some properties in SL it was even hard to move around, not here - everything worked just very smoothly.

So if you get there and join Second Life, be sure that you use SL groups, activate the group and teleport to private areas in order to get the best experience.

I also noticed that I could manipulate my world by changing some settings. You can make the suns shine all day long as if it is noon. If you go to certain places, you can exchange free objects to your inventory. So I am always moving around in the light now and I have thousands of free objects in my inventory, ranging from houses to clothes to textures which I can use freely.

And that really helps. Because at a given time I had a meeting with another international corporate lawyer like me discussing geopolitical strategies. I could play the host by putting down some couches and chairs from my inventory and giving everyone a free drink. And that is networking to me!