Posts from September, 2005
September 9, 2005
Second Life Moves to Embrace Pure Consumers
Last year I wrote The Business of Social Avatar Virtual Worlds [Or, why I really like Second Life, even if their business is most likely doomed] in which I urged Linden Lab to consider that
Consumers want to be fed content, they may even pay for it and a good platform can enable many talented people to create content, it seems that the main missing components are a way to identify and promote the content the consumers want and a create way to deliver it to them with the least possible burden on the consumer’s part.
Well, today Linden Lab announced that Second Life membership is now free.
This bold move is the first step in allowing pure consumers in – those who will spend their participation-generated (and purchased for $) Linden dollars on the all that greated user-generated content. This reduces some of the skepticism I’ve had about their recent growth hype. Assuming they continue on this path, they may well reach 1m users in their timeframe.
Congratulations to those at Linden Lab!
Now they’re in for the next challenges: optimizing the interface for consumers (which has been incrementally underway for more than a year) and dealing with the new abuses (and abusers) that come with no-barrier-to-entry registration.
I hope they’re ready!