Second Life's Killer App is a Platform For Binding Weak Ties, Says Grace (But Do You Agree?)

The evolution of high technology is all about "killer apps", a product that's so powerfully useful as to compel mass adoption, despite the usual barriers to entry (high learning curve, cost, etc.) So what's Second Life's killer app, if it has one? Company CEO M. Linden has often suggested that it's a platform for business and work meetings. Grace McDunnough, one of Second Life's most innovative live music performers, begs to differ, and does so brilliantly. In a landmark post that's mandatory metaverse reading, Ms. McDunnough argues that Second Life's killer app is a place to bind "weak ties":

We have meetings primarily to sustain or maintain our strong ties, not our weak ties... Strong ties reinforce homogeneity and don't spurn organic growth. The leverage toward mass adoption and transformation within virtual worlds and social spaces resides within the weak ties and the ability to navigate the paths of our connectedness over which we would normally be stymied in the real world. Weak ties help us build bridges that help us solve problems, find information and unfamiliar ideas. Weak ties further innovation - that is the target of a killer app.

Read it all here. If I understand her correctly, she has her finger on a profound truth. There are numerous virtual worlds out there, after all, many much larger than Second Life; there are several other virtual worlds that also enable user-created content. Second Life isn't even the only platform that enables collaborative and dynamic content creation in an immersive metaverse. So what makes this one place so special?

What makes it truly unique (and here is what Grace is getting at, I think), is that Second Life enables collaborative and dynamic content creation within a virtual community that's international and culturally diverse. A content creation platform that was only used by, say, architects, would not be near as powerful. But a place also shared and built upon by, say, a Princeton astrophysicist, a Beijing conceptual artist, a Karachi journalist, a Manhattan marketing executive, a bestselling novelist from Maryland, a Holocaust survivor, and yes, an avatar-based musician? Then you have something rare beyond words.

Image credit: Poid Mahovlich

Comments

[Mo Hax]

"Weak ties" less eloquently referred to as the potential for serendipity are clearly Second Life's greatest single advantage, which includes, as I have said many times, over any walled-garden alternative. Enterprise cultures will continue to leverage internal and external options in balance, but until they learn and accept the value of "weak ties" of "serendipity" and even of the fertility of fun in personal and professional relationship building they cannot as a company and individuals leverage this "killer app" element of the greatest virtual world to have been created.

How is that for bias? [I don't pretend othersiwe, as some do.] Yeah, SL brings more to the table than all the others until those others can offer the depth and breadth of community that SL does.

[callie cline]

i would tend to agree. the diversity in SL is FAR BEYOND anything i've experienced pretty much. i've gotten to know ppl and collaborative and be friends with individuals who i would NEVER have encountered in my real life. (or not that probable) and have enjoyed friendships with people so different from me in social status, religion, politics, profession, and more. i've been in true awe of the very tight bonds that have been formed and it's been beyond amazing for me.

great article. :)

i even am friends with a great architect lol, sounds boring tho to be in a world full of them (winks at tab scott)

thanks for the great info! :)

xoxo, caLLie cLine

[Dusan Writer]

Hamlet - I agree...Grace's post is a landmark. The killer app, in my opinion, is the ability to rez a prim. Everything else follows from that. Holding meetings, learning languages, whatever, ignore what makes SL what it is: the ability to create rich content.

The challenge, and I think Grace's post touches on this, is how to make that content easy to find, how to protect the commerce that emerges from it, and how to facilitate the communities that are created as a result of this profound ability. Let the USERS figure out their own killer apps, but fix the stuff that makes it difficult to communicate, search and bring people together around it and the killer app that has always been SL will find 1,000 "mass adoption" apps without any particular help needed by the Lab.

[NotWorkingInSL]

"Company CEO M. Linden has often suggested that it's a platform for business and work meetings. "

Except that no serious business is going to do anything mission-critical in SL when 1. the TOS makes it clear you have essentially no rights, 2. it's utterly unclear what is logged, when, for how long, for voice and chat and in the case of a business meeting that information could be confidential and proprietary.

Don't get me wrong, I love SL and use it for personal use, but I have no intention of doing RL business on it until the privacy and legal rights issues gets clarified / enhanced.

[Ann Otoole]

The rotten core of the passion fruit is that Second Life is the *property* of Linden Lab and the Linden Lab Board of Directors does not use Second Life for anything other than a line on a balance sheet nor do they really care about what the customers think. In addition the staff of Linden Lab are completely disconnected from Second Life and have absolutely no idea how things work from the resident perspective. A glaring case in point is the sad attempt to prevent traffic falsification. The way this cancer tumor of a policy is shaping up soon it will be illegal to have avatars on parcels.

Let me spell it out for those who do not comprehend the brutal facts. Who needs to put out ugly camping chairs when you can pay a service that assigns campers via a hud they wear. You pay the service. They pay the campers to loiter on your parcel. They are not bots. They wander about and socialize.

But see Linden Lab has not a clue about these things do they?

Linden Lab needs strong leaders that do not take any crap off coders and that fires instantly anyone that is found to be running a business in world representing a conflict of interest or giving preferential treatment to anyone. In addition Linden Lab families should not be allowed in Second Life at all. The issue is *ETHICS* or lack thereof.

So no matter what we, the people that pay Linden Lab's food and mortgages, have absolutely nothing to say about Second Life whatsoever. And it will fail because of this unless most of Linden Lab, including the way things are run, is changed to one of those bland awful boring to work at companies. Disney is global and is a success for a reason. So is Microsoft and other major players. If Linden Lab wants to survive they better start replacing decision makers with people from the entertainment business because entertainment is, always was, and always will be the reason people come to Second Life.

Nice article and all but it actually saddens me to see we residents/customers understand but Linden Lab is oblivious and Second Life belongs to those people that do not care.

[Myx Smythe]

As a DJ in SL I totally agree with Grace - I've met so many good people and keep in touch with them here, but LL are simply not helping. The groups limit is a joke, the events system is pathetic - you can't even do repeat events - I do five sets a week and entering all of those into the events system is a nightmare, I've almost given up.

I totally agree with Ann about LL, and that shows in the scattergun approach that's being taken towards quite significant issues within SL such as Age Verification and Traffic Bots; while such efforts may be well-meaning, the manner in which they have been expedited has only alienated LL even more from the customers.

In a group chat the other day I suggested a User Parliament or Council, an elected group of SL residents who could bridge this growing divide between LL and their residents - I was surprised at the positive responses I got to what was, at the time, quite an off the cuff suggestion.

The more I think about it, and see that other MMOs like EvE have actually implemented it, the more I think this could be a way to re-focus SL back on the creativity of it's residents, and the tools to allow us to achieve that, and in those terms, that might be a "killer app".

After the initial reaction in my group chat, I'd be interested to see what others think.