Today, I celebrate my (Second Life avatar’s) Rez Day. I entered Second Life last year on August 21, 2006. I am called Locutus Qi in this space. The name is inspired from my Star Trek fanaticism about the Borg. Locutus was the (avatar) name of Capt. Jean Luc Picard when he was captured by the Borg.

I remember going to Prithwis Da for learning about Virtual Worlds. I remember initially thinking this is so close to Counter Strike & Age of Empires that I used to play avidly in my college days in a multi-player environment. It was interesting to know these 3D environments and I could begin to see how they could be leveraged to business as well. Post that, I kept exploring Second Life and what it had to offer, when finally in December, when I was part of the Sears Second Life Build Team where I began more mainstream work. Henceforth, I have presented several papers / countless presentations around how Virtual Worlds can be leveraged for Business. And importantly, I worked on getting the first projects for IBM India in this space and currently manage several internal and external projects for IBM in this space of Virtual Worlds.
Well, recently a lot of the weaknesses of Second Life have been discussed in the various forums like Time naming it the Worst (#5) website. Also an old post by Eric Kintz about he still needs to be convinced about the use of Second Life. Well, I feel we have truly started to see the Trough of Disillusionment for this technology. We saw Second Life miraculously increase from 800,000 to 8 million registered users (whether that is for people who registered or not, is a topic of much debate. Giff Constable wrote an interesting article on that). And more recently the banning of Second life gambling joints by Linden Labs and the subsequent bankruptcy of Ginko bank. Well despite all this, Second Life as a world has taken leaps around Evangelizing what Virtual Worlds can be and should be in this space (interesting thoughts by Prokofy Neva & Gwyneth Llewelyn on LL’s actual business).

I feel SL showed how user-generated content could be so much in quantity and quality. It gave people – avatars to dress and design content around how they feel; established a virtual economy that exchanges USD 1.5+ million a day. They might not be the first in either of these but have been a compulsive case of what these concepts together with a 3D environment could do to the Internet. Suddenly the chip companies have an application to feed all the muscle they can pump into their processors, graphics cards, etc. The high amount of bandwidth is suddenly being channelized to this virtual environment which consumes it with ease and provides a compelling example. Is this the application that fuels the Information Revolution further ?

Well one clear thing, Second life does start to touch the surface and the broad idea of things to come, how corporates, individuals & the communities build these concepts further is something that remains to be seen…