Founding Linden Hunter Walk on the Power of User-Generated Content on YouTube

My pal Hunter Walk has a good Fast Company guest post on the power of user-generated content online, specifically, online videos uploaded and shared on YouTube, where he's now director of product management. Sample:

Online media is effectively creating a global living room by transforming how people across distances can share an experience. Video especially can pack a powerful punch of humanity. It can convey sights, sounds, and emotions in a different way than written word, audio, or other mediums... It allows us to identify via our interests rather than just our demographic. As media moves from being created and shared regionally to more open, international platforms, empathy and understanding follow.

If that sounds similar to Second Life, you shouldn't be surprised: Before joining YouTube, Hunter helped found Linden Lab and (as I explain in Making of Second Life) is the very guy who gave Second Life the name Second Life. So it's interesting how these two platforms might begin to better merge: As I blogged yesterday, YouTube is rumored to be investing in machinima.

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Comments

[Ezra]

The gift and curse of Second Life is that its so encompassing a social and visual product that it maybe can't benefit from sites like YouTube the way other products do.

Take Minecraft for example. I think it'd be a single digit percentage as popular as it is today if it weren't for the million Minecraft videos on YouTube. Those videos for the most part are just tutorials and show-and-tell. For Minecraft video and YouTube was a necessity because unlike Second Life, its not possible to teleport to one another's creations or simply ask a group for help on how to do this and that, minus setting up a server.

So a product like Minecraft can benefit from YouTube in ways Second Life also can, but probably never will because Second Life is so robust that everything we need for it we can find in-world for the most part. Even though a million show-and-tell and tutorial videos for Second Life would help it a lot, there's simply no need for it. Great that the product is that robust, yet sucky it makes it so insular and isolated.

I suppose machinima produced in Second Life is one of few things that can find a community on YouTube though.

[foneco zuzu]

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