Web 2.0 Is The Bridge Between 1st And 2nd Life Identity

Botgirl Questi's Identity Cloud (original on her blog)

There are hundreds of blogs about Second Life; there are nearly 1000 Flickr groups devoted to SL; there's a few SL Facebook widgets, an active SL-oriented Twitter community, and searching "Second Life" in YouTube returns over 21,000 videos. Judging by personal experience, a large percentage of users prefer speaking with each other via Skype, as opposed to the native VOIP system.  (Confession:  when I interviewed Orhalla Zander last week, the hobo king and I talked not in-world, but via Skype chat.)  So a tremendous level of Second Life activity really takes place within Web 2.0 systems which weren't made with the metaverse in mind.  In this mesh of various Internet identities, we reveal different aspects of ourselves on different mediums, depending on the social circles who follow us there.  It's a phenomenon we're only beginning to understand, one that Gartner's Adam Sarner dubbed "Generation V" and Botgirl Questi evocatively illustrated on her blog.   

It also leads you to wonder how much of the Second Life experience actually takes place outside the world.  Right now, about 550,000 Residents are in-world an average of around 50 hours a month.  How many hours do you suppose they spend in SL's many Web 2.0 nodes?

Comments

[Ravishal Bentham]

I imagine a LOT of Second Life related activity takes place in other environments. What with the instability and lack of privacy inherent in the SL platform it is only natural that people will use other solutions.

[laetizia Coronet]

Yes, a lot of activity takes place outside of SL proper. For me Facebook was, apart from the nastiness I describe in my latest blog entry, not a serious way to stay in touch, though. I have the best experiences, the best conversations and the most immersive experiences in-world. Facebook is just a gadget (and a faulty one at that).

Strictly spoken of course, there is no Second Life "experience" off-world. But like any community SL leaves it's footprints all over Internet community sites.

[Peter Stindberg]

My virtual company is an in-world company only, but heavily relies on Web 2.0 services. I talked a bit about it here: http://stindberg.blogspot.com/2008/04/my-googleized-virtual-office.html

[AndyP]

Interesting post and nice graphic.

I've recently introduced a limited level of Twitter support into my Second Friends Facebook application - http://apps.facebook.com/secondfriends if you are not familiar with it. This led to a small, but real, identity crisis because I tweet both as myself (http://twitter.com/andypowe11) and as my avatar (http://twitter.com/artfossett) and I couldn't work out which one I should link to my Second Friends profile.

It seems to me that the picture is going to get increasingly confused, especially with expected growth in viable alternative virtual worlds, alts, etc. There is very little that I do with my first life online identity (email, blog, twitter, etc.) that I don't now also do with my second life identity and I suspect that this is fairly typical(?).

Andy / Art.

[Marianne McCann]

It does make things complicated, with e-mails for both my RL an SL selves, a uahoo IM for SL, an AIM for RL, blogs for both, flickrs for both, LiveJournals for both, and so on.It's tricky to manage, even more so given I prefer both worlds don't meet!

[Francesco D'Orazio]

Totally agree with the post but the web could not only be the bridge between first and second identities, we should start to look at it also as a bridge between worlds. It could be useful to stop thinking of the interoperability as the only way to connect worlds, and start think about bridging worlds using the web as an hub. here's a nice post from Nic Mithan discussing the idea of Outeroperabilty... http://www.kzero.co.uk/blog/?p=1637

[Nahasa Singh]

A little off topic, but did you see the last occurence of "Life imitates Second Life" ?

Garry Kasparov silenced by flying penis

While making a public plea for unity against nemesis Vladimir Putin, a mysterious dangling object from the ceiling distracted the room: an airborne penis with a helicopter attached to its testicles

Some RL griefing...