A take away from the Internet Strategy Forum's Second Life presentation was not "if" but "when" an open source alternative platform would emerge to compete with Linden Lab's environment.
In light of that prospect I appreciated my conversation today with PRODIGY alum and absolutely PRwithBrains President Bill Lessard about his experience and insights working with clients striving to create buzz through Second Life promotion.
Bill's take on Second Life today:
"the 3D equivalent of what AOL was in it's day. It's a proprietary iteration of a future aspect of the World Wide Web. Just as PRODIGY and AOL rolled up all the tools for the Internet and put them in a nice safe proprietary package."
Bill also pointed out that unlike development of the Internet, Second Life protocols are not open source. Not HTML. This puts leading developers like The Electric Sheep Company in a powerful position at the moment especially since their $5m investment from CBS.
As a PR guy who's seen traditional PR strategies, Bill is impressed by the buzz-building capabilities of virtual goodie bags and digital street teams. But, as a tech veteran, he's more excited by what the future holds. Bill makes the case for using Second Life for customer service, especially for demonstrating how to assemble computers, electronic devices. Better than step-by-step instructions over the phone.
More interesting to Bill is what the future might hold. He's looking for the ubiquitous avatar, a set online identity, look and a feel complete with a little digital wallet, that can chat using voice and video and through a phone. In Bill's words:
"Imagine avatars on your phones keyed to a different ring tone."
Interesting but how far off? Last December I attended the opening session of the Internet Identity Workshop at the Computer Museum, MountainView. A room full of very smart people focused like Paul Trevithick, The Higgins Project on developing an open source platform to put identity control back in the hands of the individual who owns it. I was struck by Paul's statement that on average an individual has pieces of their personal data sitting in 700 databases that others control.
My sense is the IIW has some work do before the universal identity with avatar emerges but no doubt somebody out there is busy working on it. Anyone?
~ Jenny Ambrozek
