Can Second Life be Second Business?

Kent Newsome is on a roll lately.

In his latest post he rags a little on Steve Rubel for saying that he believes

. . . that 3D virtual worlds are going to become a place where people will increasingly spend time and conduct business online.

It’s a fair enough skeptical look that he presents, but in all fairness to Steve who says,

Second Life is like Geocities was in 1998 - a big idea, but a little ahead of its time. I suspect that within a year or two robust 3D virtual worlds will eventually get far easier to use and run completely in a browser. Then they will become more mainstream.

I think there are a couple of major questions to consider.

The most important is whether these 3D worlds will ever provide a richer experience than a web-based collaboration. If not, then Kent is right.

Right now it seems is more productive to use “traditional” means of online collaboration to accomplish things.

But here is a little anecdote.

One day I knew that a conference being webcast on the west coast was happening and that I was interested. I also knew that Kosso (Koz Faraina) was simulcasting it in Second Life. So I signed on and joined a group of five or six others and it was a much better experience than watching the webcast alone.

Second Life is embryonic, but it’s the potential that has people excited, I think.

No, it’s not a viable threat to online collaboration yet. But online collaboration itself is the future of business, and when the day comes that a 3D world is as easily accesible as other online collaboration tools and provides a richer environment to do business, then it will be a place to do serious business.

It may not happen, but it’s certainly possible.

Ajax World Day 2

Steve Rubel just gave a nice talk called the me2revolution, about widgets, ajax and syndication. In other words, how to get your content or message out to where the users are, since he gives the page-view about three years before it’s dead as a meaningful metric. Couldn’t agree more.

I tried to get him to say pay-per-action mght be the future, but he still belives in ad-based content, though he seemed warmer to sponsorships.

Also, I knew he couldn’t get through the talk without a mention of Twitter. His point there was about news feeds that people are creating for Twitter, like Dave Winer’s NYTimes feed. If you don’t create it or at least enable it, others will, so there is no place for not being aware of these technologies.

It was a tough call between Steve’s talk and Adam Sah’s Google Gadgets.

Earlier, Bret Taylor of Google spoke about the challenges of Ajax. He concluded that despite all the negative aspects, it is and will be the way developers create web applications going forward. he also highlighted somenice toolkits for creating ajax applications, and of course Google Web Toolkit was on top of the list. It did look interesting though.

Next up, Google is doing a demo, and then Gregory Narain looks to be taking Stowe Boyd’s place to talk about Social Applications.

A few of the other bits of talks I’ve seen have been a bit about marketing Ajax as a whole, but if you’re here, I can’t imagine you need to be convinced of that.

Looking forward to Andi Gutmans on PHP and Ajax.

Tom Morris says buy a book and forget the conference.