I attended a talk at SMU by Cory Ondrejka, CTO of Linden Labs, creators of the extremely popular (it is not a game) Second Life. It was an engaging and informative talk but as expected he had his biases. He tried to sell Second Life as a cheap way to venture into being an entrepreneur, improve design & innovation skills and to enhance learning. I have my doubts but overall I think it is useful for learning, for example, the popular author of A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink, is using Second Life to interact with a class of University students.

However, one thing he said struck me very much. He said that on the web less than 10% create content as opposed to 65% in Second Life. That to me sounded like it will be more difficult to succeed on Second Life (as an entrepreneur) than on the web, if a niche is correctly chosen. I didn’t get the chance to ask him about it though I have emailed him. So if he replies, I’ll post it here.

Update: Cory’s Reply

Dipankar,
The 10% number on the web comes from talking to folks at USC who have a longitudinal study on web use in progress that has been going for a couple of years now. No, I don’t think that this means it is harder to succeed. In fact, I would argue that it makes it easier, since you have more people to learn from and leverage. As for the long tail, SL communities have far more interaction than web communities, so again I think that you’d have more chance of success.

Cheers!
c