Second Life Ages – To 1997 From 1993 – In One Week

Last week I reported IBM’s view of virtual worlds, Second Life Works When You Pretend It’s 1993 – which says essentially that Second Life today is like the Web was in 1993 or maybe 1995. Now this week Nick Wilson is upping the ante a couple of years, giving us 7 Reasons Why Virtual Worlds Are Like the Web Circa 1997. Those two years make all the difference, as anybody who remembers 1997 can attest.

If IBM says virtual worlds are ‘95 then most of us except the infrastructure developers can relax a little – but if Nick says it’s ‘97 then it’s time to pay attention, because that was the year that money started flowing to the Web, and the fledgling operators who were already there began their decade of prosperity.

You should probably bookmark Nick’s article, because in the years to come you’ll want to refer back to it, and probably quote it. For now, there are two points that leap out at me.

2. Clueless Corporations.

“In any new medium, eventually the suits turn up, and get it utterly, and totally wrong. To the hilarity of the rest of us. Like the WWW before them, Virtual Worlds are no exception, and corporations, as well as politicians regularly fall afoul of new media rule #1: Look before you leap!”

Indeed. Look twice, and think twice, and beware of the analysts and media reports. take some time instead to read the views of the savvy inworlders, starting with Nick’s post. And listen to leading IBM virtual worlds developer Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger being interviewed by Robert Scoble and Larry Magid last week. Also check our Second Life Quick Reference For Business Strategy.

7. Selling Picks and Shovels

In any gold rush, the ones that are really guaranteed to profit are not the gold miners, panning through grit to find nuggets, but the ones selling the picks and shovels.

Point Seven to me has always been the primary margin to exploit in something like Second Life at this stage: think of the success of Levi Strauss, flourishing a century and a half after most of the California gold rush miners are forgotten.

It seems pretty clear that regardless of the major plays, with their inevitable spectacles of gain and loss, a modest tech shop with marketing, promotion, and programming skills can keep a studio active and make a good living for years to come in this environment.

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Nick Wilson in his 7 Reasons describes many familiar dynamics of the land rush: staking territory and creating walled gardens; tasteless design gaucheries that exhibit the sense of shouting, which you can get away with in pioneer spaces, but not at all in more densley packed and sphisitcated locales.

And then there’s the habit of turning over your entire entry plan to the boutique creating your presence for you, with the familiar result of an award-winning 15 minutes of fame, followed by no further function or marketing plan – this is Reason # 5, Rock Star Designer.

Reason # 6, the ease of gaming what little system there is, gets the heart a little excited; but mostly for the moment it looks like fun to see how this aspect of the infrastructure evolves too.

All of these things are reminiscent of the early Web, which had the same feel of scrabbling for scarce resources. It’s eerie to realize this now, especially in the blinding glare of the immense global wealth of the Internet. The lavishness of today’s Web is purely created by the network effect, which roughly says that the value of a network increases exponentially as its users increase. The Web continues to prove this in multiple ways. And presumably the same thing is coming round again in Second Life.

As the 7 Reasons points out in its introduction, the virtual worlds are nothing to do with the surface evolution of the Web as we know it today, they’re not a logical progression of collaboration and user generated content. Instead they’re an order of magnitude removed, but also running sympathetically in parallel. All the 2.0 mechanisms are still being built and cobbled together in the virtual worlds. But as these worlds manifest the mechanisms for ordinary users to create 3D habitats for collaboration – quickly, and at will – then the great migrations will begin, from the flat Web to the three dimensions.

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Nick Wilson is a bit of a tech person, and his last message that I really heard after he left Performancing was that he expected the world of widgets and mashups to go beyond simply entertaining, and actually perform some useful work. In this sense he felt that the next steps to take would be fairly tough, requiring actual skill. We noted this in a post, Web 2.0, We Hardly Knew Ye, but the link given there to his expectation of a Thinning of the Herd is now defunct. Does anybody know where this podcast is now?

So, one day maybe I can get Nick Wilson’s thoughts behind his flight from the noise of the Web-2.0-morphing-to-3.0 sprawl and bustle, into the vast pioneer world of 3D. But it’s probably as simple as virtual worlds being the next useful place for us to get some work done together, and he’s in there helping to build it.