Monday, April 27, 2009

The "Avatar Age"

This Wednesday I'll be trying Second Life for the first time during the final session of class. While my professor and classmates will all be in on campus trying it out, I will be in Baltimore at a conference and so I'll be joining them "in world."

I can't say that I really know what to expect. I don't know where to place virtual worlds like Second Life within the broader Web 2.0 phenomenon. What really distinguishes a person's or a company's presence in Second Life from their presence in the blogosphere or on social networks? An avatar? I'm guessing it's much more than that and I hope to have a better sense of what it's all about after Wednesday's class.

Jackie has a post about how "in world" meetups differ from in person meetups but I guess I'm even more interested in how virtual worlds differ from other types of social networking platforms.

What can you do in Second Life that you can't do elsewhere on the web? I know you can buy things, talk to people, and even attend classes "in world." But you can do all that online with a variety of other tools as well. So other than the avatar, what is it that makes virtual worlds useful?

Anyway, I'm definitely still in the "I don't get it" phase with virtual worlds. But unlike Zaid, I won't knock it til I've tried it!

2 comments:

  1. I know you want an avatar with huge shoes, but you should really get one with everything exactly the same as you, but it can fly. Like Dwight.

    On a serious note, I tend to think that second life is a little more of a fantasy world than other social networking places. Like that woman who divorced her husband in second life, because she really wanted to do it in real life. Kind of like an RPG with no real objective. So I wonder if it's truly social networking at all?

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  2. "So other than the avatar..."

    I think that's the only part I'm really looking forward to about it! haha

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