The business of Second Life (cont’d)

More random notes regarding Second Life, which continues to draw lots of coverage:

+ Caliandris Pendragon, writing on Second Life Insider, questions the widespread assumption that Second Life is dominated by young people:

My experience of having many friends and acquaintances in SL is that the minority of them are under 30. … I work as a mentor and the incoming avatars must be a fairly random bunch, and I have met a substantial proportion of my friends that way. They aren’t all 19. By a long chalk.

+ More on that, and other thoughts on doing business in Second Life, here.

+ Also on the subject of doing business in Second Life, and focusing in particular on competition from real-world brands/companies: Joystiq argues that “Second Life’s denizens are concerned that the entrance of big business into the world will drive them out. They’re right to be concerned. Their businesses are as at risk as the local bookseller’s business before Barnes & Noble comes to town.”

Akela Talamasca counters such fears may be overblown, because: a) many SL “residents” don’t want their world “tainted by commercialism from RL;” b) instant travel makes real estate less critical (at least I think this is the point being made); and c) “It’s entirely possible that a preexisting SL store could create or emulate a style of clothing designed by a RL store. Therefore there is no material difference between a white t-shirt made by The Gap and one made by Mistress Midnight. What matters then is which one costs less; that is the one the average user will buy.”

Regarding c) — I’d be interested in the intellectual property fallout if a Second Life resident started doing virtual knockoffs of real-world clothes. Once you get beyond white T shirts or other commodities, things get more complicated. Also: In those cases where it really does come down to a simple matter of cost between something made by a real world company, and something made by a Second Life entrepreneur, real world companies have huge advantages.

Here’s a recent Business Week article on Toyota’s SL efforts. Originally the company was going to simply give away cars, since for them this is all just marketing anyway. Realizing that this sort of tactic pisses off the local entrepreneurs, they’re now selling cars for the going rate.
+ Reuters has launched an SL news site.

+ Long Tail Guy Chris Anderson did an event in Second Life. I don’t see what’s good — even for somebody selling his book — about having an avatar that looks like your real-world self.

+ Here’s a pretty good Second Life Herald bit complaining about SL looking too much like RL, thanks largely to marketing efforts (and journalists, I suppose).

+ And finally, here’s another Second Life Herald piece, more serious in tone, about the commercial drift of SL, and what it means to the residents. Here’s what I think is the most interesting passage:

In the Game of Second Life, the losers will be all those homemakers in New Jersey or part-time Wal-Mart workers in Wisconsin or security guards in North Carolina who were making up a storm of content, making a near-living or a substantial amount of money with either content creation, club management, or rentals. There will be less need for them now — they played their roles as early adapters, bug-testers, and server-load-tests, and now they need to retire.