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The Creative Power of Second Life
Alice, over at Kotaku, has a post up looking at what Second Life means to the Web 2.0 crowd. Cory Ondrejka gave a presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference about what 2L is about, and dropped some interesting statistics on the audience. From the article: "Here's Cory's killer factoid, just announced here: Over 70% of Second Life residents have created an artifact - from scratch - in this past week. That's one crazy level of output. To give you a bit of perspective, that's approximately 23,000 human hours of play-work per day. Cory points out that this would cost Linden Labs over $400m a year to produce centrally, clearly not a viable business prospect. "
He he! with all these in game terminals and AIM api being free, soon you will get "get larger" IMs and mails in game as well as in real life.
And how on Earth does he come up with the hour figure exactly?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
And therefore it would only cost Linden Labs about $4m a year to produce work with more significant quality. It's kinda stupid to do this kind of analysis anyway. The whole point of Second Life is that it is different. Comparing Second Life with, oh, I don't know, WoW, is like comparing apples and oranges. You can like both, it's ok.
How we know is more important than what we know.
...the graphics in Second Life weren't oh-so-1995--and yeah, everyone is making stuff. Well, that's just great. Kind of like the last time I was at a county fair and realized the same thing...and not only didn't want any of it, but wanted to get as far away from it as humanly possible.
My friend and I both submitted our cards. I didn't have any problem, and doubt I'll see any fruadulent charges (or ANY charges).
:)
My friend, however, had his credit card company call him with a "suspicious charge". Apparently LL charges $1 to the card, and then credits it back (I guess to verify that it's a real card?!) Sounds kinda weird.
I don't have a problem with it, but obviously YMMV.
As for Second Life... I started it up just as a lark. I'm a coder, and I liked the idea of creating and scripting objects for fun. And it's been a lot of fun. I answered a couple want-ads, looking for scripters, and have actually gotten paid to create some casino games.
I'm not going to retire off it, but I don't remember making money or particularly using my brain (Fireball, Scorch, Scorch, Scorch, Frost Nova, repeat) in WoW... so it's been fun.
The furries, however... they scare me a little.
Places like The Forest, FurNation Worlds and Luskwood are brimming with user-created stuff. Not all of it is very good, but there's certainly a market for it - or at least a lot of people willing to create stuff in the hope that they can sell it.