Technovia

So little imagination

Coverage of Second Life over the past couple of years has fallen into two categories:

1. "Hey, Second Life! People are making millions there! Every corporate MUST be in there or it's a dinosaur!"

2. "Hey, Second Life! It's all about kiddie porn/rape fantasies/scams/crazy shit! All the corporates are leaving so fast you can't see their pixels for dust!"

Cory Edo, of Electric Sheep Company, is more than a little pissed off with this kind of bipolar attention, and sums up what's great about SL in a great post:

"The people that discover, enjoy, and stay in Second Life tend to be of the variety that see this paring of freedom and creativity so often neglected by any other form of entertainment and feel a rush, the joy of a challenge (but a challenge from yourself to yourself), the blank canvas of a painter or the silent instrument of a musician. This is why SL has such a massive entrepreneural base. This is not free money - this is money earned through creativity, effort, honing of skills (often new), and more effort."

Yes, Second Life contains a lot of dubious stuff. And, from a brand perspective, if you enter Second Life then you're going to be sharing your world with some (ahem) "entertaining" characters. But you also have a chance to engage with people on a level which you won't find anywhere else, and dig deep into some incredibly creative tools.

And, as I've said on several occasions before, it's an ongoing process, and there's no point in the build-and-forget policy that several corporates have tried. You're either in it for the long haul, or you're not in it at all. As Cory puts it:

If every press and media and RL company all unanimously declared Second Life to be an utter waste of time and attention, I’d still be here, along with everyone else that has discovered its potential for themselves. We probably wouldn’t tell you to let the door hit you on the way out, but we’ll be happy to show you what we’re up to when you finally come around.

Second Life spam

If you use a site that's designed to help you make and maintain contacts, such as LinkedIn, you'll be familiar with the occasional random requests to make friends. These usually come from people that you might know (but probably don't), half know (but don't want to know more) or just plain old don't know at all.
Yesterday, I got just such a message via LinkedIn, from someone named “Eufrosina Pachedo quicksolutionmortgage” (the clue is in the name), asking me to connect. Of course, I declined – the only people that I connect to are people who I know personally, or who's work I know well enough to want to connect to them.
But the interesting part was in the body copy of the request email:
“May I ask you to also take a look at the Second Life location of a good friend of mine, David Hall aka the GuruConnector. He is also involved with a new venture called CNO Partners at www.cnopartners.com. “
This piqued my curiosity enough to jump into Second Life (you can often find me there, as “Ian Priestman” if you want to say hello) and wander along to the location that was included with the mail. What I found was a small hut in a one of the hideous parcels of land that's been split into ever smaller packets, all of which are used for advertising anything from lotteries to tattoo parlours to gambling on the mainland of Second Life.
It's been a while since I was on the mainland, and I'd forgotten how horrific that some areas of it are. Apart from the small package of land that was occupied by a tiny office for “CNO Partners” there were rotating ads for just all the usual suspects, and it looked like a nightmare vision of completely untalented, unregulated ad-splurge.

This is the first time, though, that any unsolicited mailer – and that's what these contact requests really amount to – has ever included anything about Second Life, and I think it's interesting to consider what will happen when spammers really get their teeth into its world. If Linden Labs thinks it has a problem with self-replicating objects now, wait until it starts getting the attention of the kinds of people who've had years of experience constructing spam-mailing botnets.

[Edit - correct spelling. Thanks Kim!]