Okay, I lied. I am going to rant some more about SL and bullshit snobbery
Should we treat all startups, especially those with big ideas critically? Of course. Always make sure that what everyone is talking about isn’t snake oil. However, saying that the reason Second Life failed was because of a “milkshake test” is a little absurd. As I mentioned earlier, there were and are still plenty of problems with SL. However, the milkshake test is about whether the product being sold (a open-ended, user-driven virtual world in this case) was providing a meaningful service to the customer.
Ask the teachers, universities, and businesses who were able to push the boundaries of online collaboration and education. For them its a tool for online communication and interactive presentations unlike anything they’ve ever had before.
Ask the artists and musicians who found their voice and a true audience through it. Try looking up Sean Ryan on Youtube. He was too shy to perform publicly until he began performing through SL under a psuedonym. Now he’s doing vocals for major label musicians.
Ask the communities of roleplayers who found a place to finally found a platform pliable enough to make their ideas a reality. Whether these were mundane, profane, or fantastical doesn’t matter. What matters is that they found it to be a platform far superior to anything else.
Ask the countless entrepenuers who learned the fundamentals of running a business by opening one in SL. Most of them most likely never made money, but many did. Even those who didn’t succeed learned valuable lessons in what and what does not work when running a business.
Ask the communities of marginalized individuals who found collective shelter and support.
Ask the non-profit causes like the Relay for Life which raised substantial amounts of money through in-world events.
Second Life provides a meaningful service. It does so with a portfolio of bad features and at a pricetag which is most likely far too high. But those are correctable issues. Getting snobby and implying that it never offered a valuable service pisses me off for reasons that I can’t entirely explain. Second Life has a lot of things that it does right, and condemning it as useless because it is struggling does a disservice to any other venture looking to follow in its’ footsteps.
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