SOSL! The possible Gentrification of Second Life.
November 2, 2008 1:18 pm
A must read to all, Alpha Auer speaks out for all the creative types inhabiting Second Life - and all those creative types still to join SL! Noticing that the majority of her friend list that stays active inSL are either builders or writers, she concludes Lindens might be marketing towards the wrong folks: ‘A person who logs in every 3 months or so to attend a virtual meeting doth not a true Resident make. Cultivating the involvement of a strata of society from which would emerge true hardcore Residents would seem to me the only way to salvage the situation here. In other words bring in the artsy crowd… .‘
Miss Alpha is convinced Second Life should get it’s share of the Web 2.0 creative activity. Guess what? She’s probably dead on target! If you look at how the Second Life communities that formed themselves in exactly those ‘web 2.0′ locations such as Flickr, T61 (and more), … are thriving, it could be miraculous what happens when you invite exactly those larger creative communities into Second Life. Lindens, you can’t expect that your residents do all the marketing for you, give them tools, help, or maybe send your own marketing team out - in that direction!
Another likely result of inviting the ‘artsy crowd’: And then secondly, artists also do this wonderful thing called the gentrification of decayed city spaces in Real Life. You turn loose a sizable group of artists in a totally run down inner city area: They fix up, they renovate and of course - indeed most importantly - they also bring style and coolness to the place. Next thing the realtors step in, the artists get ousted out - the neat little cafes and things stay (of course) and the fat wallet types move in. The earliest example I guess would be SoHo, NYC but there are literally thousands of examples of this the world over.
But Miss Auer she rightly points out all of these communities would be wise to demand some serious reassurance (preferably in writing) that land prices would be guaranteed and that policies would remain stable. In other words, that what happened to their counterparts in Real Life would not also end up happening to them in a virtual world. (Quite the opposite of what is happening now with ‘our’ Openspaces.)
Go read the complete ‘Gentrification of Second Life‘ article on the NPIRL blog. As for a roadmap suggestion of where Second Life is could be going, I <3 it. (That and we're still waiting for Linden Lab's Official Roadmap to Second Life.) More about and by Miss Alpha Auer on her blog.
4 Responses to “SOSL! The possible Gentrification of Second Life.”
Phewwww…
Am I glad you are in agreement here Vint!
:-)
Um, when you get a chance, please tell my RL landlord and RL grocery store manager the same thing? ktxbye
“some serious reassurance (preferably in writing) that land prices would be guaranteed and that policies would remain stable.”
eg. In my - very social, I’m Euro, but sure you remember that - country, my landlord is not allowed to raise my rent more than a certain percentage / year, as long as the renting contract lasts. (Same factor the wages are indexed by.) He can set another price for a new renter, though. So, if you’d move to .be, I’d happily to tell him/her that for you! :)
The problem with catering to the content creators vs the meeting types is that, if the meeting types will actually USE sl for meetings, they generally belong to corporations that will pay money for the thing if they actually find it of benefit to their organizations.
Starving artist are, well… starving artists. People who keep asking for land prices to be kept at the current level, or lowered if possible.
I’d much rather SL was full of 3rd party, independent content creators like it is now, if it ever did become something where LL had a major content creator on board to fill up sims with pre-canned content, that would blow chunks, but I don’t see how a business model of selling some $70/yr premiums accounts and charging a little bit of land tier to some artistic types is the kind of business that they want to limit themselves to forever.
I’m also not convinced that the “go to meeting” types form a sustainable and lucrative business model for the virtual world, but we know that some level of this use and the boringness it necessarily entails will be part of any VW in the future, once the business types get VW’s to some degree.
Care to comment?