Life Extension for Second Life

I recently came across a couple of interesting articles in the German daily "Handelsblatt" on Second Life (SL). Whilst the first (dating back to February 2008) joined the doomsayers providing examples of how quickly companies want to exit SL, the more recent one (June 2008) shed some light on new developments in SL (and its offsprings) that point to another direction.

Increasingly companies discover the use of virtual worlds for - guess what - employee attraction, retention and development. Examples like Unilever, IBM, BT are provided that show how virtual worlds can help for example increasing interaction amongst employees, getting exposure to senior management and supporting the onboarding process of new joiners globally.

Interestingly, companies rely more and more on closed SL look-alikes. This is mainly driven by security concerns about open platforms but also by stability issues. I'm convinced that we will see more of that in the future. Companies will move away from open platforms, develop their own closed ones and then starting to open them up again for specific clients, partners, suppliers etc. Gartner's Steve Prentice predicts for example that by 2012, 70 per cent of organisations will have established their own private virtual worlds. Costs of creating such private corporate virtual worlds are reasonable, ranging from USD 5k-50k. Steve also gives some interesting reasons why 90% corporate virtual world projects failed in the past.

Given the increasing prevalence of private virtual worlds it's important that vendors of virtual world software ensure interoperability and open standards. For a comprehensive discussion of that topic see Juha Hullko's interview on open virtual worlds. Linden Lab (the creator of SL) and IBM have announced in April this year a joint effort to exactly do that - seamlessly linking SL with IBM's own custom-built world behind the firewall without the need to log on and off. Quoting from the respective press release: "...deployment of the Second Life Grid behind IBM’s firewall is intended to allow for an environment of security-rich content creation, data assets and internal communications such as chat, IM and voice, while also enabling connection to the wealth of user-generated content on the Second Life mainland."

Despite this exciting news, we should hold our breath. Public social networks, virtual world platforms etc. (eventually) need to make money. There revenue model (and so their implicit valuations) is mainly driven by advertising money and this in turn is directly correlated to the number of page views. So - as a recent Economist report says - networks want to "maintain a tight gripon their users' information, to ensure that they keep coming back". So it might still take some time until social networks and other Web 2.0 platforms become "like air"!

A question for you: do you see similar developments in your own company? What is the perception of your company using virtual worlds for internal use? Let's discuss.

Bye for now!
Charles