True, there are some graveyards out there in cyberspace, littered by tombstones reading "AltaVista, You were almost as good as the World Wide Web Phonebook" and "Friendster, If the road had been finished, you might have gotten there."

However, it seems to me that times have changed a bit – or a lot. With around a billion users worldwide, the Internet is big enough to sustain multiple players on one street. Think of it is as the mall food court model. Nobody says Burger King’s going out of business just because Wendy’s moved in next door.

So consider this age of the Web the Killer-killer. As long as what’s out there is useful, has a sound business model, and attracts the right kind of (note: I didn’t say "large") audience, then it’s likely the site will succeed, so long as the market’s not flooded.

But don’t call it a killer.

In the not-too-distant past (time is much more relative on the Net, though), Facebook opened up its platform to developers and the wild death predictions began. Facebook’s soon-to-be casualties: MySpace, possibly; and LinkedIn, most definitely as its users defected.

Defected to find a Facebook six or eight or ten months later that had turned into a giant toga party. And there’s nothing wrong with a raucous toga party, mind you, unless a piece of digital poop comes flying at you in the middle of networking with a potential client or employer.

Yes, digital poop. Or if you’re on Second Life, digital dildos in the middle of an interview.

Hardee-har har, I’m going someplace where adults hang out.

That’s the direction LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye seems to be taking his website. True Facebook’s openness (temporarily) put some pressure on LinkedIn, but Nye’s restraint may be what keeps it out of the Web’s ghost town. A New York Times piece says Nye will open up the LinkedIn platform to approved developers and ideas:

“We have no interest in doing it like Facebook with an open A.P.I. letting people do whatever they want,” Mr. Nye said. “We’re not going to have people sending electronic hamburgers to each other.”
  
Yes, or throwing poop and dildos. There’s a time and place for everything and that time is college and the place, apparently, is Facebook.

The goal for LinkedIn, he said (paraphrased), wasn’t to create a place you’d come back to several times a day, but to create a place you could accomplish your goals, cleanly and safely, while LinkedIn makes money from advertising revenue shares and premium memberships.

And that seems rational enough to be a winning model. Not a Facebook killer, or any other kind. Just a place useful to the business-minded.

Just try to read this without feeling like you’re sitting in the back of the classroom, snickering with your buddies at the slightest hint of double entendre – you know, she said jacket, heh heh.

It’s bad enough this story involves virtual sex and real fake money, but add in that "Stroker" is suing an imaginary nemesis in a real court of law and you’re head might explode.

Okay, so Stroker Serpentine’s (what, Balls McFly  already taken?) nemesis isn’t really imaginary. He’s an avatar until Serpentine (real name Kevin Alderman) figures out who the flesh-and-blood version of Volkov Catteneo is.

Catteneo, according to Serpentine, is a pirate who’s been selling knockoffs of his company’s virtual sex beds. The beds are sold in SecondLife, to SecondLifers with no real FirstLife (that’s a joke, a cheap one, please no hateful comments or emails accusing me of stereotyping virtual perverts, and/or the kind of perverts they are in real life).

Each SexGen bed sells for L$12,000 (US$45.11) – yes, there is a currency rate, and yes, Reuters provided the conversion, presumably with a straight face.

Reuters also provides a link to the PDF of Serpentine’s complaint, spelled out in 79 very real and mind-bending pages.

After Reuters conducted a virtual interview with Catteneo, Wagner James Au of GigaOm chatted with Stroker for more details on the case.  

The virtual world adds its hat to a ring that includes already-successful SecondLife, and to up-and-coming Gaia, which my 12-year-old stepson obsessed over for exactly five minutes before obsessing over an Xbox game for exactly five more minutes (his presence on Gaia was replaced by 10-year-old cousin).

As I indicated earlier, these worlds skew young, which should be marketing Utopia, given the early-adopting pattern of teens.

"Rather than build the virtual world first, we created Zwinky avatars for users to express themselves creatively and visually wherever they go online," said John Park, Executive Vice President and General Manager. "We then listened to our users to create the Zwinky Virtual World they wanted."

Inside that virtual world, users can choose between 29 separate hangouts and have access to dozens of games and activities. They can shop for the latest virtual fashions, accessories, or furniture for their dorm rooms using Zbucks they’ve earned through participation.

Yes, pretend money for pretend things that may one day be worth real money you can buy real things with. The world has taken a strange, strange turn and I’m already so old it’s pathetic.

"We are one of the fastest growing groups within IAC because of our ability to share highly personalized, relevant content such as Zwinkies, Webfetti, and Smiley Central with a ravenous, passionate audience," said Scott Garell, CEO IAC Consumer Applications and Portals.

And don’t forget how valuable all that information is to marketers, in case you had trouble reading between the lines in that press release quote. The reapers have already begun.

Writing for Giga Om, Wagner James Au calls the sudden advance of online kids’ worlds a "gold rush" and wonders why it’s taken the industry so long to notice.

At present, they’re actually the only reliably expanding niche in online worlds. After all, World of Warcraft remains the uncontested traditional fantasy MMORPG, dominating all its competitors (except in Asia), while Second Life remains unchallenged in the user-created 3D world sub-genre.

“There’s no such thing as old or new media anymore. We’re just media,” Moonves said. The company plans to continue to use Web sites, blogs and Internet video to increase their number of viewers as well as engage the audience.

They are working with YouTube on a project called “15 Seconds” where viewers post their 15- second message on YouTube and CBS will select the best videos to be broadcast on the network. The first video will be shown before the Super Bowl on Sunday, February 4.

CBS also has plans to create a “Star Trek” destination in the virtual world of “SecondLife“.

They will also test technology from Sling Media that will enable users to share television clips and post them on a site to for friends to view. CBS hopes that this could increase ratings for certain shows.

If somebody spends the time to take 20 clips from ‘CSI Miami,’ I think that’s wonderful,” Moonves said. “That only makes him more involved with my show and want to come to CBS on Monday night and watch my show. And we’re going to get paid for the clips this guy takes off our air as well. It’s win, win.”

Moonves went on to say,” Some technologies will work, others will not, We learned a lot watching what happened to the music industry with Napster, and we’d like to avoid those mistakes.”

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While I strongly believe that Second Life has enormous potential as a business environment – and, thus, is something people in business ought to be paying close attention to – I’m certainly not on a mission about it to persuade all and sundry to see it my way.

Either you will or you won’t. It’s entirely your choice.

But you owe it to yourself (at least) to consider as many angles as possible before you land on one side or other of the argument.

If you Google or Technorati for Second Life, you’ll turn up a mixture of intelligent commentary and lots of hype. It’s largely the latter that plays a key role in helping some people be skeptical and dismiss the whole thing as an overrated game.

It seems to me that too much of the negative commentary focuses on here-and-now matters that are largely to do with the frustrations of today’s technology.

I’m referring to things like slow networks, unable to connect to the Second Life grid, graphics issues with the program on your PC, having to upgrade it from time to time, and so forth. And some people seem to be hung up about how many avatars are online at any one time, kind of wondering why all the 2 million registered users aren’t hanging out in world.

Clearly such issues play a significant role in your Second Life experience, but they are not the important issues!

What’s far more important is to look beyond this myopic view and focus on what people are actually doing in Second Life (almost in spite of the technology).

• Think about why companies like IBM, Dell, Adidas, Pontiac, and many more are investing time, energy and money in experimenting with and in this virtual world.
• Why Endemol is running a Big Brother contest in world.
• Why NBC/iVillage has ventured there with ‘Girls Night Out.’
• Why ABN Amro Bank opened a virtual branch in Second Life.
• And why Altered, the new film from the creators of ‘The Blair Witch Project,’ will be premiered at 5pm PST today at the Pontiac island.

In a pretty thoughtful piece in Second Life Insider last weekend, Tateru Nino wrote about the virtual world nay-sayers, and why they are saying no. The post included this credible view:

…Not all of our naysayers are strictly on the outside, either. Some of the most vociferous are residents who can’t let go. They may not log in anymore. They may have even cancelled their accounts. You’ll still see them, however, posting on blogs and forums – presumably to try to ruin it for others, though their motives in this wise would seem to be obscure. Many people just consider that to be griefing.

Writing in GigaGamez yesterday, Wagner James Au wrote a compelling post on Second Life around the concept of “it’s too hyped- and it’s not hyped enough.” Some excellent history and detailed commentary on many of the tech-related issues I mentioned above.

But maybe the best view of all came in this comment to Tateru Nino’s post:

…Does all this naysaying really matter? No. At the end of the day those who are into it will be into it, those who aren’t will resist it and the public will vote with their feet – they will either grab it with both hands and it will inevitably lead to (not be) the future of the Internet, or it won’t. And if it is, a whole lot of the naysayers will be left behind.

Amen to that.

Related posts:

Second Life insights from Text 100
Second Life: Reality not escapism
Real-world opportunities in Second Life
Get a Second Life now

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Panelists include Sibley Verbeck of The Electric Sheep Company, Kimberly Rufer-Bach of The Magicians, Rueben Steiger of Millions of Us, Boliver Oddfellow of Infinite Visions Media and Nick Laurence of Rivers Run Red.

You don’t look at SL as a confined business, but a bigger picture that shows consumers are tired of being marketed to, but you work with them. It does take a lot of bravery to work within these new confines, but companies do need to embrace the new mediums.

Integrated campaigns with blogs, MySpace, YouTube and SecondLife – the most immersive in the social media spectrum. Unless you create value and commit to the long term to the residents of SL – a different culture than other communities – then get out of SL. Some companies do get, and the other ones do not. If they companies (or the marketing/PR firm that pretends to understand SL) do not get the value part of SL – working with the community, bring value and worth to the client – then they should not recommend such tactics.

You do not sell to SL – but participate. You participate in a way that makes sense, not just to sell. If you just try to sell, you are going to be told to “get the hell out of here” by these companies, and by some of the firms.

What the companies are doing is leading an onslaught, a way that brands and companies and experiences can go into SL, but also the users that want the experience and then come into the world (power users and newbies). You want to see the experience go well, and while no one knows what that means, and while we run a company but a lot of the group is thinking about the issues on how it best works with the community.

SL is an excellent way to engage the community, offer things new to the communities and the brands, a way to speak and have a relationship with the brands. We live with these brands, they are in our world, and it’s a way to make them a part of the world we can live in.

The theme of participation is pretty standard – don’t let the man annoy us. But, a lot of SL’ers are making their own brands. There needs to be a balance between the major brands, and the SL’ers that like to build their own brands. What is that balance?

If you think about it, brands comes from branding cows – it is companies branding you, owning you. If you want a big PR splash for your efforts, save your time and money. Consumers are not stupid, and you will do yourself more harm than good by going into SL. You are going to leave your brand as a ghost town – it’s about a sustained commitment. The companies that are brave enough to go forward, to keep their builds interesting, they are going to have to program content. Such as major wrap ads – perform live, entertainers. It gives you something cool. The net-net if you follow a rule book is a good thing for both SL’ers and corporations.

If you are not in SL, and try to shoe horn your ideas in SL without stepping foot into them … it is not going to work. The community drives the acceptance.

Media is changing how we work in SL as well. We can take the RL and SL, and blend it into one experience. Breaking down the fourth wall, mixing reality. It’s where we have artists – movies or musicians – becomes part of the community, and having the conversation in the world. It is much about a sustained appearance, opening up the accessibility to the brands itself. Giving these people the new arena to engage with the public to interact with the “stars” – the new community interaction.

Right now, when a company goes into SL, it is still a big PR story. We are all trying to steer companies to do it right, get companies to do something of real meaning and value (the first stage). The thing for the large corporations is that they are trying to set up barriers to competitors from coming into SL – how do we as SL’ers make sure that companies do not interfere with the people who just want to do their thing in SL, or other companies …

How do we measure return, though. Basically, SL is a fledgling environment, but you have some demographic data from SL, and add subjective analysis – cultural tastemakers in both RL and SL. If you do something in SL, you can measure the people that do come to it. The way that the content is portable – RSS, press mentions, YouTube videos – it’s a composite of all the media to measure.

Updated with photos of Millions of Us and Rivers Run Red peeps.

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Jeremy Pepper is the CEO and founder of POP! Public Relations, a public relations firm based in Arizona, USA.

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At the same time, news outlets near/local and far/international are recruiting viewers to submit news content to test the social media waters and learn how to do more with less.

So riddle me this. Why hasn’t a mainstream media outlet simply launched their citizen journalist initiatives in partnership with YouTube? This would make it vetted and popular. It would also be easier to pull together with content that was much more viral (read: more traffic to the mainstream outlet’s site).

On that same note, why hasn’t YouTube created the YouTube News Channel-a completely citizen journalist-based news desk? It might provide spotty coverage, especially at first. But it would also be the first news program driven completely by user interest and user content. The ad dollars would be sure to follow.

261 YouTube groups pop up when you search for news on its site. The topics range from the silly to the sublime of course. Supporting my theory, I found The Cincinnati Tube, a channel “dedicated to all content related to the Cincinnati area: news, politics, arts, life in general.”

As mainstream media realizes it needs social media, they are missing the point, and the clue train, by creating their own in-house solutions to tap into it. The equation for mainstream media’s online future is open source + on demand.

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Kevin Dugan is the author of the popular Strategic Public Relations blog. Kevin is Director of Marketing Communications for FRCH Design Worldwide.

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