It would be a mistake to look at SL as it is now and treat it as a static thing, however. SL is very conducive to running other businesses within SL. It’s entirely possible that the next WoW phenomenon happens entirely inside of SL. Linden Lab are in the process of opening orientation islands to third-party operation. Between that and the open source client allowing companies like Electric Sheep to distribute customized clients, the barrier to such an endeavor is again lowered.

Other things to think about:

Some SL brands are rapidly maturing. (DE:Design, Tokyo Rose, XCite, …) As search and clothing management receive better interfaces, Sony may lose their “Home advantage” in the professional content. (Did I formulate properly an idiomatic pun? I looked forward to typing this from one sentence ahead.)

It’s a mistake to look at a small percentage of users creating content and lose sight of the value of clothing created by a friend. Many of us make friends with scripters, builders, tailors and so on, and hand-made items from these friends carry special value. If each creator has just a few people he or she shares with, the percentage benefiting from the paint set is multiplied.

The current generation is extremely skeptical of most kinds of marketing. The demos of Sony Home I saw pushed Sony product after Sony product. Sony may rapidly jump the shark on this one and lose credibility. Here, SL’s community content is in a way an advantage, as corporate presence is a peer presence. It may continue to be cool when companies come in and do what SL members are proud to have been doing before the companies.

Lastly, Sony will never allow people to be many, many thing. The Sony name is tied to too many other business lines that would stand to suffer if the Sony name is tarnished. It is doubtful that Home members will have the lasting desperate emotional involvement of the typical furry, Gorean, or what have you, who believes he or she has found the only environment on the planet where a desired personality can be fully free.

well, they’re a megacorp with their own view of what the universe should look like — they are content producers, the rest of the world are simply consumers…

who said corporate capitalism?
I was about to touch this but my post is too long already and this is a topic for itself: how estetics turns to politics…..

For me, personally, My activities in Sl consist of very occasionally shopping for clothes, and mostly chatting with people about what interests me. Assuming HOME is a more stable platform, would I not be better off there, rather than SL? On the other hand, is it not the sheer inventiveness of the content in Sl that gives me so much to talk about in the first place?

Ultimately, for all the reasons Gwyn defined in her first reply, HOME really is no competition for SL as a metaverse-building platform (and, as Sony have made clear, was not conceptualised as such). But oh for a future in which the flexibility of SL is combined with the plug-and-play simplicity of a games-console!

That is the lesson indeed of Web 2.0, and Sony Home is missing the point — because, well, they’re a megacorp with their own view of what the universe should look like — they are content producers, the rest of the world are simply consumers…

Still, that doesn’t mean that Sony Home won’t have millions and millions of users. Of course they will! But the Metaverse will be built elsewhere, and not at Sony.

Compared to these exceptional people the ‘art’ most of us are capable of is rubbish. Some people are gifted artists but the majority are not…

Very true, but we should learn a whole lot more from eastern approach to life. There is not only art that is exceptional – the art in museums and on walls, there is also art of doing art for art’s sake. People are performing art no matter if it is going to be hanged anywhere but in their own bedrooms. And that is not some second grade art which is to be neglected. That is one of the most important activities in our lives.

Humankind has not invented art for the sake of exceptional pieces. Art is there to be performed massively. Masters of art and great pieces does exist, that is for sure, but they exist in cohabitation with a huge amount of people making something that will never reach immortality nor even 15 minutes popularity. Those two are unseparable. One cannot live without other.

But, let’s get back to the second life and Sony’s Home. Sure that most of the residents are buying stuff, but take a look on sandboxes – they are full most of the time. And those people there are not professional builders. Maybe some of them will become, but most of them are just having fun, building and socializing. Some people are going out in sandboxes just like some other go to the clubs or staying home with friends.

Creativity is part of each of us, and it does not matter which form it takes or if we are particularly good at it. Creative process is something that affects both the object (in broadest possible sense) we create and ourselves. That is why art is with us through the whole history. And that is also the reason of web2.0’s success. We want not only to read the news, we want to blog. We want not only to go to the movies, we want to show our own vids on YouTube. And more important than uploading it is that we want to make them.

Sony did took a peek into what is popular and found out that nice world of web2.0. But web2.0 is not only sharing files and information on YouTube, MySpace and del.icio.us. After all, Sony and other publishing companies are fighting a war against filesharing. This way they want to secure positions in the new media. There is something much more important in it that is known to Lindens.

That brings us to the beginning of the essay:

Is SL a ‘game’? Yes, if you want it to be. Is SL a 3D MySpace? Again, if that is what you want, that is what it is. In fact, Linden Lab have done user-generated content so brilliantly well that SL is both nothing and everything.

Trying to define second life that way is first move made wrong. Second life is a platform. It is a tool box, material and place to work. It would be complete kit if there were plans inside, but there are not any. Platforms doesn’t have plans inside. That is the point.

What does that mean? One can build Home or World of Warcraft or any other game or 3d social network in second life. Maybe graphics will not be as cute and sharp but with time passed even that will not be problem. But one cannot do other way round. There is no way to make second life out of a game.

Sony Home is, however, not being creative. They’re just replicating what There.com or IMVU (among many others, like Kaneva) have been offering for ages (and with at least half a million users together): visually appealing content in 3D chatrooms. So will Sony Home be more successful than the rest? Very likely. Sony is Sony — we can’t ever forget what’s behind that, a huge megacorp with unlimited marketing resources. I can very well imagine that Sony Home, the ultimate 3D chatroom for the PS3, will grow to have dozens of millions of users very, very quickly.

The trick for success on virtual 3D chatrooms is actually simple:

1) Make it insanely easy to use;
2) Make content as high-quality as you can;
3) Allow people to “personalise” (not create!) their “virtual space” as much as possible;
4) Market it aggressively.

Sony can do all the above, far better than There.com, IMVU, or any of the tiny startups. The only big contender would be Google Virtual Worlds (which very likely be something similar) and the yet-inexisting-and-who-knows-if-it-ever-would-be -developed Microsoft Metaverse or Apple’s iWorld; they would be the only ones to be able to “threaten” Sony, since they can also develop similar products. Microsoft and Apple, of course, since they control their own OSes, would have an advantage over Google; but we all know our history lessons, and Google, in spite of that apparent disadvantage, did manage incredibly well (iWorld, of course, would be much cooler!)

And then what? Second Life is not “only” a “virtual 3D chatroom”. The huge step in understanding that the key building block of a “metaverse” – as opposed to a chatroom — is user-generated content. Yes, obviously, only 10% of the people will generate content for the remaining 90% — but that’s the ratio you have for producers and consumers iRL anyway!

User-generated content is far more important in defining the metaverse than most people think. The Web would not exist if we wouldn’t be able to create our own websites if we wished. We all know what happened to “controlled content” (ie. in the hands of a company that controls the environment): look at Microsoft Network (which survived for 6 months in 1995, and then clever Bill simply joined the Internet bandwagon). AOL took some more time to understand that, but eventually they went the same route — as did CompuServe.

All of these companies/services thought that they would reap more benefits if they could only use high-quality licensed content in a closed environment, tightly controlled with high licensing costs.

And all those business models ultimately failed. Who pays this day for a proprietary browser to Microsoft Encarta, if you can use the Wikipedia instead? Oh, well, the usual argument is that Encarta is a professional encyclopedia, and Wikipedia isn’t — but is that really so? How many people still buy Encarta, anyway? On the other hand, in spite of internal troubles, Wikimedia did raise a million dollars from donations, in four weeks, by the end of last year.

In the battle of closed content versus user-created content, the lesson is called Web 2.0. Web 2.0 is a nice buzzword, and perhaps nobody really knows how to profit from it (except through Google AdSense), but the truth is that it’s dethroning every other “proprietary” and “closely controlled” models around. If you can’t read it on subscription-paid Wall Street Journal, you can get the same information from a blog of a business analyst somewhere in New York, London or Tokyo.

User-created content goes even further. It’s the basis of an open economy — good old market forces at play. We can watch it as we see content and services being sold by the millions in SL, every day (and these days, these millions are US$). Oh, I’m sure that Sony will get millions from Sony Home as well (if they didn’t, why are they launching it anyway), by selling licensed, closely controlled content. But… who will set the prices? Sony will. By contrast, in SL, it’s the market that dictates the prices. And these are tied to quality — and advertising, of course (advertising, in return, will provide a new service).

Think of the whole chain of value inside SL. If you wish to launch a new product, you need to hire someone who is knowledgeable in SL — ie. has the required skills and talent to develop your product. Then you need to promote it. Simply placing it on Search > Places is not enough; you need advertising. So, people started creating magazines, and living from the ads there (and not only Google AdSense). In return, they would need to hire people to write for them — virtual journalism was born! Those journalists, in return, need to interview people in-world. For that, they have to “look good” — and that means buying nice skins and clothes — and do some socialising to get good contacts for news leads. All this is an incredibly dynamic economy which is perpetually in motion and with lots of positive feedback loops: it grows and grows, and it grows faster than SL grows in users, because it grows in complexity.

That’s why we have real media companies in SL (Reuters, Axel Springer Verlag) and real real estate businesses advising people on how to buy land in SL. They don’t pay Linden Lab nothing, they don’t need special tools, they don’t need licenses, or agreements. All they need is an avatar, a few L$, and skills and talents to work in-world — or hire those skilled people.

Now imagine what happens with Sony Home. Sony is one of the largest content producers in the world (think about Sony BMG — which are already in SL — and their games division). They can produce high-quality content for Sony Home and don’t need anyone to do it for them. At some point, however, they’ll open up the licensing to create content for Sony Home — and charge huge fees or demand that all content gets pre-approved (like There.com or IMVU do). The small companies have no chance to compete with Sony, the giant content producer. Only the huge content producers — who already work with Sony anyway — will be able to afford to “be there” as well. But… how will they market their content? Using Sony, of course — that’ll be another source of revenues for Sony Home, in-world advertising. Again, you just have one supplier, one monopoly — no market economy. You won’t see e-zines and blogs popping up very quickly, and live from advertising there — since that would cut directly into Sony’s revenue stream. More likely, Sony will pay Reuters (for example) to create a channel for Sony Home, too, and give them an exclusive license to write about Sony Home. And then they’ll tell other content producers: “look, you can place ads at Reuters, since it’s a Sony-approved news channel — if you place your ad anywhere else, we’ll sue you”.

Why should they react differently? Sony is huge, has a monopoly on Sony Home, controls the servers, the content, the application, and, ultimately, the users. They have invested on this technology and need to reap benefits out of it. They couldn’t care less about “metaverses” – having a nice virtual economy going on doesn’t help them to sell more games, which is what they care about. Also, they want people “locked” to Sony content — by viewing things in Sony Home, and staying there, they want that a message goes around their users: “look how cool our content is! Why do you need to try anything else? Look how things like Second Life are crude or plain ugly — at Sony, we only employ highly trained professionals for deploying the best content ever”

And their users won’t care about low-quality content, either — they’re used to Sony’s quality, easy of use, and addictive entertainment. That’s what Sony Home will provide, too — in the form of a chatroom.

So, while it’s obvious that Sony Home will be a success in terms of number of users, I’m rather sceptical that it’ll be “a competitor” in building the metaverse. They will fight for users, of course — who will come from people interested in the kind of content that Sony develops. I’m not claiming that they won’t have millions, or even hundreds of millions users. They will have those very likely.

The difference here is just one. In a battle between a closed, “state-controlled” economy, and an open free market, who will ultimately win?

So the issue won’t be “who has more users in 3 years, SL or Sony Home?” Because Sony might very well win that race — perhaps very easily, if they can stay abreast of Google, Yahoo, Microsoft or perhaps Apple and Nintendo.

No, the question is: between the two models, which one will become the Metaverse?

Just take a look at all “closed content” sites on the Web these days and see how many users they have. You’ll see they’ll fall in two major categories: academic research papers, and sex. These are the only ones that people are willing to pay for.

I can safely bet that Sony isn’t going to enter either of those markets.

But Second Life already does both — just like the Web

And at the end of the day, I can very well imagine a SL for the Sony PS3 (released at the same time for the Xbox and the Wii, of course), simply because the client is open source and you can naturally change it and distribute it to be installed on your PS3 — while Sony Home will remain forever stuck inside the PS3 (and successors). So while SL can move from the desktop (or laptop) into mobile phones and consoles (all brands), Sony Home can’t move outside Sony.

A much more cleverer approach, of course, would have been to simply get SL’s open source client, get a few thousands of servers, rewrite the client completely to give it a huge improvement in performance and usability, and log all Sony users into “Sony’s Second Life”, with Sony’s beautifully created content — but inside SL. If Sony went that route, I could predict that they’d buy out Linden Lab in a few years Remember, people would buy PS3 just to log in to SL! (yay, no crashes, no lag, no crappy graphics, no cranky interface!)

But the “not invented here” syndrome will always be in the minds of the corporate structures that hold monopolies; even Microsoft Metaverse, if it were part of the plans for MS, would never be SL-compatible…