Second Life 2.0: The Corporations are about thesmselves

One thing I think that frustrates more of the smart people I know than anything else is how many of them are not making very much money, while much less smart people are safely in well paying jobs. I meet many of these people in blogging and in Second Life. The news, I think, is that things aren't going to get any better:

Last week IBM and Linden Lab, operator of Second Life, announced that IBM will run Linden software on its own servers so that it can set up Second Life environments, free from the distractions of the open metaverse.

“The Burning Man era of Second Life is over,” says Wagner James Au, author of The Making of Second Life. Phil Rosedale, Second Life’s founder, had been much inspired by the Burning Man festival, an annual freak-fest held in the Nevada desert.

“Second Life is a totally unstructured world, like Burning Man. You turn up, you don’t know what’s going on, there’s a lot of nude people and an 8ft transvestite. Only about 10% of people are going to get past that.”

Meaning that the real money for Second Life, the corporate money, is about to dry up from Second Life the grid, and got to Second Life the garden. My message has always been that that Second Life would take off when corporate money arrived. The clear road to that money is through ordinary channels. Many people, I think, came here hoping to prove themselves as good programmers, learn a new technology, and then get a better paying job after their old sources of employment dried up.

I suppose what this means is that now is the moment to push to join one of the large companies that is doing Second Life stuff, because they aren't going to be paying attention to Second Life. It's bad news for people on the LL grid itself, since it means that many of the people you want to meet, will, instead, be hiding behind firewalls.

I mean many of those naked people are, in their day jobs, well paid people in corporations, and they will slum on the grid. But they aren't going to bring the people they slum with back home to Mommy Inc. very often.

Oh and a side note, many large corporations cover gender reassignment in their health plans, including, recently, Goldman Sachs. So it isn't the tranny part that is the problem...