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Having spent most of my spare time over the past week or so researching or ‘playing’, ‘in-world’ or out, with Second Life (SL) I now feel somewhat qualified to have an opinion. And you know what? I don’t. I don’t have a fixed opinion about it, that is. At this point in time I just have lots more questions..

Astute observers will have noticed all my Second Life posts now begin with ‘Is..’ and end with a ? This is my way of reflecting my view of SL at this time..

Being an ‘outsider’ I have absorbed what I can of the community through its public face – ‘in-world’ creations, out of world blogs, forums, podcasts, and the like – as, I think, my SL links page will attest. I have even met, and chatted to for some time, a fairly high profile ‘in-world’, long-time, ‘resident’.

So what I know now is that this is not some digital nirvana – fairly constant topics in the community include:

• lag (system slow-down due to load) & crashes (plenty of which I have experienced),
• updates & thier negative effect (this is a complex technology system under constant development whilst it is in use),
• intellectual property rights (IPR), and the basic fact that any digital content can always be stolen ‘somehow’ – even in SL, and
• the effects of ‘governance changes’ by ‘The Lindens’ – be they currency, land covenants, or whatever

In short, my observation tells me this is a community full of creative, passionate, and talented individuals who all have an opinion, and have the platforms & outlets on which to express it.. (in-world or out).

The thing that is repeating, ‘in-mind’, at present, is that this is an early adopter community. My parallels here are other early adopter communities I have been involved in (as a participant, but probably still an ‘outsider’) like the Amiga community in the 80′s (which still exists even though the ‘machine’ is gone), the pre-Internet Bulletin Board System (BBS) communities of the late 80′s, and the Internet chat communities (IRC, IM etc) of the mid-90′s.

A more recent example of an Internet community is probably blogging.. where one’s standing in the community is raised by being constantly quoted by many others in that community..

And this is the the crux of it really; the internet phenomena tends to have been (commercially) driven, whether we like it or not, by:

• ‘porn or sex industry’ (plenty of examples obviously, but also includes many communities like dating sites, AdultFriendFinder etc)
• advertising/selling (Google, Ebay, Amazon etc), or
• specific communities (like IM, dating, blogging, Flickr, SL and many others I probably don’t know about)

These are the high-profile Internet ‘business models’ of which community creation has featured large in the Internet’s history. And this is no surprise – if you can raise a community – you can advertise and sell to it. And, logically, why not, this fits reasonably nicely with real life (RL – oh dear, I’m picking up the jargon :-) ) business models which economists, business folks & marketeers (is that a word..) understand..

The tension, of course, is that in early adopter communities there is a level of idealism (full disclosure: I can be an idealist :-) ) which is unlikely to ever adapt to any ‘business model’ e.g. some might be doing SL as a technology for techologies sake.. some might think its great place to socialise. In general, most early adopters, I suspect, won’t be terribly interested in the fact that Linden Labs have to develop it into a viable business and make money..

So I think, at this point, SL is about community – an early adopter community. Listen to SecondCast, or take into acount that the recent ‘in-world’ Relay for Life raised over $US40,000 dollars for Cancer Research, and it starts to become fairly obvious, in my opinion.

These early adopter communities are often the breeding ground for the ‘next wave’ and I personally think that the SL community has been onto something for a while (SL launched in 2003) and it just might be ready to go ‘mainstream’-ish. It’s probably a year or two yet before its developed to a level for wide adoption and part of this is about the hardware catching up with the type of ‘processing grunt’ that SL requires.

If you just want to check out some very talented work that folks in SL have created, and for whatever reason don’t want to go ‘in-world’, then these are good starting points:

• Where is SL is Artilect video (@ YouTube)
• Lip Flap – a SL film (@ You Tube)
• Second Life Relay for Life video (@ YouTube)

[Update: 17Aug2006]
The next in this ‘series’ is ‘Is Second life New to you?’