i personnaly am making money out of it, alot of Second life is based on roleplay, and i dont mean kinky sexual weird stuff, i mean there are full regions there decorated in medieval style, where you have to roleplay a character in those times, be a mage/knight wtv, other regions are more modern situated in a post-apocalyptic world.
these regions take away the numbness of click/swing/click/swing/kill/rinse and repeat and give it an themed attidude.
so i imagined, so many people playing in those Roleplay worlds = so many people needing the proper attire to play there as well, so i made some stuff like for example, swords. all knights need swords right? so i built some and scripted them, they are more popular than hotcakes.

then you have communities, in 3D. like gossip girls show built the city in there and all the fans go and talk about it in a more “personnal realtime chat” there is also CSI:NY going on as well.

so if companies actually looked into this engine better, i think they would know what a powerfull tool it is.

ive spent in SL 4$ US, and now i make over 100US per month by just being in there. yes, its not a job but hey who would say no to an extra 100USD$ per month that you can.. i dont know, invest, save, spend on your girlfriend, spend on parties, buy stuff, donate, burn, whipe stuff with it?

LOL, every single person in SL is a potential computer customer. In fact I’d hazard to say they are a GUARANTEED customer. If the marketers did what any idiot knows they should do they’d definately generate business, business from people who are willing to spend some cash for a better experience.

“game that costs money” SL costs nothing unless you want it to.

“I tried out second life earlier this year. I spent about an hour wandering around being treated like shit by the people that acknowledged my existence and ignored by anyone else.”

So what you’re saying is that you went to a party with a bad attitude, expected people to greet you with open arms and then left to write about how horrible it was. I expect that your RL parties go quite the same way if attended with the same attitude. Like life, in SL you get what you give. Besides, do you greet everyone you pass on the streets? Why would you expect people in SL to do essentially just that?

Firstly, remember that in many ways, Second Life (and other virtual worlds) is just another marketing channel, albeit with unique characteristics.

When companies run marketing campaigns on other channels (such as TV, radio or print) and the campaign fails to deliver the desired level of response, one of two things happen:

1. The creative concept is critised as not being appropriate or good enough. In other words it did not resonate enough with the target audience or deliver the right messages.

2. Expectations were too high in the first place. Either because they were not correctly analysed or the channel has a different set of metrics.

You rarely hear about the media channel being critised as being incorrect. Some brands have run campaigns in Second Life and the platform has been critised with very little commentary on the quality of the actual concept or the metrics being used to assess the success.

The concept of media planning in Second Life (understanding the attributes of the channel audience – what motivates them – what they want – what the platform can deliver) has been overlooked to a very high degree to date in Second Life. This is the area that successful virtual world campaigns should focus on.

The points you make about the interaction with customers would be fantastic if not for one important fact. Most potential customers wouldn’t go anywhere near this and most of the ones that do don’t return after trying it.

If the first time you visited a shopping mall you were greeted with abuse from other shoppers you wouldn’t want to go back especially if you read that a unit in the mall is possibly hosting a Jihad training group or paedophile fantasy role play sessions.

It will be interesting to see how PlayStation Home turns out. I suspect they will simply steal all of the good elements of SL while keeping a far better control on the bad parts. Because they can stop persistent abusers PS3’s from playing online they have a massive advantage in keeping Homes users well behaved and thus the experience should be far better for a new user entering the world. This of course will create a far better arena to attract advertisers and retailers. Thats aside from the obvious technical advantage of every user running the program on an identical piece of hardware.

And I love people hating on SL. This gives me more market entry time… Wont mention the hundreds of thousands we are dealing with on SL platform already. Hate on.

Second Lifer:
Actually I’m a commissioned officer in the US Army and run a very successful company developing for the Second Life platform. The reason that SL is popular is that, unlike Sims 2, the platform is extensible. Now, for you who can only post silly unproductive things like Norbit, extensible means that you CAN CREATE in SL: both objects and scripts that can even connect to the web.

Cool things to do: get Natural Language Processing combined with AI in the game. BTW, if you can’t see value in this, post something like Norbit did. You can have automatic translation. What this means is that there is a PERSISTANT, EXTENSIBLE environment where a geologically distributed audience can interact, and yes, in 3D. Personification of character results in exhanced experiences of communication and collaboration. But if you don’t like the 3D you can connect via web with no GUI for whatever reason (social, business, etc) just like any other portal (MSN, Yahoo, AOL) and choose what the heck you want to do.

Interested to hear the following naysayerz…

The correct part is that common advertising is not working. I’m glad. Maybe an innovative platform requires innovative marketing? And who are these companies, what did they speculate there ROI would be, and what was it?

At least your page looks pretty decent…