Get a (Second) Life!

Walking to my office this morning, I caught today's SF Chronicle headline at a newsstand outside Whole Foods: "Love 2.0" I thought to myself, hmmm...fitting for Valentine's Day in Silicon Valley I suppose. Perhaps even more fitting is the latest target market for online matchmaking, it's the "I sold my company for $80m, and Vegas is getting too expensive to find a 'girlfriend,'"crowd. Or it's the: "MySpace? Who wants to wind up on 'To Catch a Predator'?" crowd.

As Min Jung Kim so eloquently put it in today's festive piece: "They are using the actual tools of Web 2.0 to find more effective ways to get laid." Hey, whatever works. Happy Valentine's Day everyone. Here's my suggestion for Valentine’s Day: It is time for these peeps to get a Second Life™.

Why not? This virtual world is almost better than reality at times. As I mentioned in my opening blog, Second Life is a big deal. Bigger than most people realize or have taken the time to contemplate properly.

Quick Disclaimer: Remember what this blog is all about: separating the truth from the naïve, and from those that write before they think.

I was saving my Second Life thoughts for a later blog, until I read this Second Life story posted today over at IT Business Edge. So here we go...
The author attempts to question the business value inside Second Life’s virtual world. The piece lacks teeth, substance, and interest. Check out the author’s bio on this blog:

“Ann was a leading media authority on automated teller machines before coming to IT Business Edge to cover tech alignment and business value.”

Did she say ATM machines? This is exactly the type of journalistic wisdom that needs a healthy challenge, especially if we are talking about something as disruptive as Second Life. Why waste the net bandwidth and disk space necessary to carry that story at all? I’m at a loss on that one. The author even falls on the sword at the end of her own story, stopping just short of throwing in the towel on the whole piece:

“When in doubt, we go back to the advice of a Booz Allen Hamilton associate that appeared in a recent article on Second Life: Companies need to ask, “What can we do better in Second Life than the other ways we’re already doing them?”

Booz Allen Hamilton? The next time I am in doubt about the future of innovation and Silicon Valley startups, the only “Booz” I’ll be deferring to is Don Julio down at Tres Agaves. Is that not the most naïve question on this subject? If they were clever, they would have pushed that question to the very beginning of the article, to invite a insightful debate of just what does work better, worse, or just differently in the virtual world.

I personally wouldn’t comment on Second Life, or any topic for that matter, unless I understood (not just heard about) the subject for real. At the very least one should have gotten off Orientation Island before saying boo. Then again, for many of these folks it's more about placing catchy brands in the title of a boring blog to spark readership.

Anyway, since I’ve had the good fortune of getting the latest and greatest straight from the Second Life’s fearless leader and others, let’s get real. Second Life isn’t going to be huge. It already is. The reason Second Life can scale so wonderfully is because it in itself is not a web service, not a b2c business, not anything in the typical business sense. Rather, it is what I call a platform service. Not an enterprise software platform that you download, install, and customize, a service. Like grid computing with a purpose. A platform with the flexibility to enable everyone else: people, companies, and marketplaces develop on their own terms inside the world. Some have said that Second Life is like eBay, an intermediary. In truth it’s actually one level of abstraction beyond this. An intermediary of intermediaries. Virtual “eBays” and just about any other type of business models are possible within the world.

Second Life has attracted the interest of some serious players in the industry looking to do much more than kick the tires on this virtual trend. I’ve talked to execs at Cisco, Sun, and Amazon, and they all get it. The value lies with the residents- what companies like these and communities like ours will make of it. Don’t ask Philip or Ramzi at Linden what the value is going to be to residents, ask the residents. That is the whole point of Second Life. Imagine setting up an economic infrastructure of your own design, as if the United States or the rest of the world had yet to be incorporated. New and innovative business and economic models could never be instituted nor tested with such immediacy and precise feedback analysis in the real world as we know it. What can be done in Second Life that can’t be done in the real world? We decide.

The growth in Second Life and at Linden Lab is staggering. And it is healthy growth, not dotcom bubble kind of growth. Second life is well positioned at the intersection of the new social computing society we live and the smart businesses that are shaping our economic and industrial future.

Expect Linden Lab and Second Life to surprise you, perhaps when you least expect it. Based on how this company is performing both financially and virally, it may soon run up against the problem Google faced earlier in its growth trajectory that forced it to have an IPO sooner than planned. However, I might also believe that they could achieve some pretty impressive results with less than 1000 employees. Way less. At least at this stage, the platform strategy enables greater scaling prospects than Google, simply because they only need to focus on building out the virtual world framework vs. business and consumer applications, tools, etc. In fact, by the time they reach 200 employees (probably as soon as this fall) they will be a venerable force. They’ve definitely got growing pains. Keeping up with the growth is today’s number one challenge at Linden Lab-- the classic “good problem to have” here in Silicon Valley. If they can continue to attract world-class talent, scale their network infrastructure intelligently and quickly, and stay focused on the platform, the world will no doubt be hearing much more from Linden Lab and Second Life. Stay tuned. I’ve got more to share in future posts.