re:ad

There is an incredible amount of press coverage on the topic of Secondlife out there. »Web2.0« is a term no one can hear anymore, how about Secondlife, just a buzzword or worth the hype?

There have been so many controverse opinions in various articles, blog posts and forum threads out there on the topic of Secondlife in the last few months and it seems hard to find your own position in the nebulous discussions going on everywhere.

I found some interesting points in David Kirkpatrick’s article No, Secondlife is not overhyped in Fortune.

»Is it a game? No. Is it a marketing opportunity? Yes, but who cares? What matters most is that it may point to the future of the Net«

He can see some very important developments in virtual worlds like Secondlife. Most important seems that there is a way of a social life like the one we experience every day in our offline world. This is something he can’t see in the web in its current shape, even if it is 2.0. When we think of successful user-driven social networking sites like MySpace, we can definitly say Secondlife goes much further. The complete platform has been designed by users from the beginning on.

When I think back to my first attempts in Secondlife I can see myself being really disappointed. I was frustrated as the interface was way too hard to use and not at all intuitive enough for a beginner. Nevertheless I definitly liked the concept and many ideas it is based on.

Some days ago I mentioned the concept Sony presented with »Home« their virtual world for the Playstation3. After watching the full presentation of Home at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco I started to think about Virtual Worlds a bit more in detail.

Even if I would never buy a PS3 just because of this feature, Sony is definitly doing some things right. Of course graphic looks much more sophisticated than it does in Secondlife, but moreover I can see some really good points coming out of Sony’s Home.

A small feature I realized quite soon is the ability to do voice conversations as well as chatting. In the area of multimedia content, Home also offers the possibility to watch movies in a virtual cinema or share personal video or audio files on video screens or speakers in a room. In this area Sony definitely was inspired by sites that are made up of user-driven content, like YouTube and MySpace. If I think of a virtual world with access to personal videos, movies and songs and the possibility to share them in a virtual world with all my friends I can really see something going on, and this could maybe be the foundation for a new version of the web.

Of course I could also go into the internet watch a new movie trailer, send the link to my friends in an Instant Messenger and then decide if we should go and watch it in the cinema… but how about a virtual world that comprises all this functionality? Purchase a cinema ticket in the virtual world, watch the movie interactively with your friends while having the capability to voice-chat during the movie, rate it and take everything we consider as Web2.0 a step further…

… and yes, this sounds a bit scary to me as well, so let’s go and meet some REAL friends!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 23rd, 2007 at 6:27 pm and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.