MY AVATAR SPACE

"It's a 3D MySpace" is the thumbnail description for Second Life I've heard more than a few times recently, and for a four word summary, it's not half bad.  Like Orkut before it, MySpace is essentially an online roleplaying game where the profile page is your avatar and your user-created content, and the leveling mechanism is the amount of friends (or to put it more plainly, hookups) you can accrue.  So it's fascinating, but not surprising, that Secondlifeme, a resident-run MySpace/SL mash-up launched a few months ago, now has nearly 3000 members (1 10% of the total Second Life population, but a significant percent of the most active residents.)  Users run screenshots of their avatars and often, real life photos, sometimes including their real names and background info, sometimes not, the totality becoming an eccentric weave of SL and RL identify, avatars depicted right next to that emblematic pose of the decade: someone sitting in front of a computer screen, looking into their webcam with a look that's usually a mixture of awkwardly seductive, painfully self-conscious, and touchingly vulnerable.  If the MySpace generation depends on their web profile as a lure for sex and romance, they're now enlisting their avatars to help in the seduction.

And given all that, it's not suprising that Secondlifeme now has a competitor: Second Life Profiles.

Comments

[Hal9k Andalso]

I mention this not to be nit-picky, but more to show how open the opportunities in this area still are: 3000 signups is a little over 1% of the current SL population, not 10%.

I suspect we'll see a lot more happening in this area than we do now as both the population and interest grow in SL.

[Hamlet Au]

Thanks for pointing that out-- oof, I'm horrible at math, made the correction.

[runelogix Au]

Grrr! "3D MySpace"? I feel SL is devalued by the comparison, a friend I invited to SL that used MySpace said on there first day in-world, "This is nothing like MySpace!" Granted you did say "3D" My Space so I want harp on it too much :o)

[Philip Dhingra]

How does this compare to There and imvu?

[Hamlet Au]

To keep the analogy going:

SL : 3D MySpace
There: 3D Sims Online
IMVU: 2D There + AIM

[Hamlet Au]

I'm trying to post this from SL. Can I do it?

[rikomatic]

While I support using social networking tools for people aggregate and connect with each other, do we have to emulate the Gawd-awful look of Myspace? I'm tempted to create a profile page there, but I couldn't stand to look at it later.

I'm off to Second Life Profiles, which is less damaging to the eyes while supporting much of the same functionality....

[Johan]

Actuall - sl.me.com has nothing to do with Second Life --- it was me.com who basically just added some second life pictures to their site and that's it. www.SLProfiles.com is the ONLY profile site out there dedicated to Second Life Only :)