I read Ross Dawson quite a bit, and he says Oz is a couple of years behind the curve in social networking – which surprises me.

But if true then that means you have a perfect margin to exploit for leadership and early adoption.

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Ross

In Australia, many companies are using their Second Life presences for reasons that are unknown even to them. They have witnessed the hype surrounding virtual worlds and Web 2.0, and they don’t want to miss the boat. And yet, they have signed up without a clear understanding of why or how Second Life can help them build their businesses.

As your post suggests, Second Life is currently where the world wide web was in the mid nineties. It was fun and exciting at first but there wasn’t really that much to do. It took years for the technology and community to develop.

One of my favourite websites, the Way Back Machine (http://http//www.archive.org/web/web.php), stores website archives. You can view your favourite website and marvel at how primitive it was back two, five or even ten years ago. More than that, it’s tangible evidence of the Internet evolution.

Many businesses are using SL purely as a marketing tool – which is why they are failing to realise a strong ROI. But Second Life is more than just another marketing channel. Second Life has so much potential beyond that of promoting a product to a target market and I think we will start to see this as companies get more creative with their Second Life spaces. I talk about this a lot on my blog, http://www.talkingtechnology.com.au

Sheryle Moon