SL has a far more technical demographic and offers three dimensional areas for meetings, training, recruiting and some dare to even experiment with economic modeling with a virtual banking system.

Interestingly the CIA has a Facebook page and the US Air Force and Army are in Second Life. They both offer value which must be weighed against the demographics and goals of any effort. As we move beyond Web 2.0 and towards Web 3.0 Second Life will increase in popularity and value.

Who would have imagined five years ago what’s happening in AJAX-based sites now? Well, based on your research profile, you probably did! So I definitely defer to you as someone who would know some of the real-world potential for these newest tools.

I’m mostly concerned about people lumping MySpace and Facebook in the same category. They’ve seen the singles ads all over MySpace and equate that with what social networking is. And I frankly think the MySpace interface is awful.

When it comes down to it, as I’ve said in another post, all of these new media are just tools, and the real insight is to find ways to use them to meet practical needs. I think the classroom setting Ramesh mentioned makes a lot of sense for SL. And maybe it would be a really efficient to put a meeting together with people in multiple time zones (or continents.)

And yeah, just having fun experimenting with them is great…because you never know when an experience you have will create an insight that can fundamentally reorder how you approach a problem through tools.

there was such a rush into Second Life by lots of big brands, and they spent a bunch of money on it without much deeper knowledge of it than I have, mainly based on buzz or racing to be “the first ____ in Second Life.”

That drives me nuts as well. But now that the SL hype is cooling, I don’t want to see it go in the other direction, where people are choosing the opposite conclusion than before (from “SL is awesome!” to “SL is useless”), but based on the same media groupthink. (Magazine and newspaper accounts are often particularly vexing in this arena.)

Anyway, thanks for your clarifications. I love to see thoughtful discussions about this stuff!

Actually, a lot of my friends in Facebook still have question marks for their photos. They are relatively new and haven’t quite gotten that part yet. They’ve joined because I invited them. But that just reinforces for me the difficulty of getting new people to adopt a technology, and with Second Life being more complicated and requiring zippier hardware, adoption will be slower. It obviously has been slower, as witnessed by the relative sizes of the two user bases.

I do agree with you and with Ramesh that for some businesses and applications Second Life could be good, to create really deeply engaged relationships. If I had one thing to change in my original post, it probably would be the “forget Second Life” phrase. That’s stronger than I really meant. I think exploring Second Life is a good idea, and I probably will get around to it.

But my main point was that there was such a rush into Second Life by lots of big brands, and they spent a bunch of money on it without much deeper knowledge of it than I have, mainly based on buzz or racing to be “the first ____ in Second Life.” I mainly wanted to say that if companies are considering Second Life or have gone there, they certainly should be in Facebook, too.

As you note, I’m clearly an advocate for Facebook. I appreciate your contribution of nuance and balance. Corporate marketing isn’t monolithic, and just as the Peninsula law firm’s call for all companies to block Facebook doesn’t make sense, neither should anyone say all companies should steer clear of Second Life.

Surely corporate marketing is not a monolithic problem space, and companies can have different reasons for developing (and experimenting with) different approaches to relationship and community development. How can you make a generalization that Facebook is objectively better, based on, of all things, a Wired article?

Additionally, login as a measure of engagement has some rather obvious limitations. I log into Facebook a dozen to three dozen times more often than I log into Second Life. But Second Life captures my imagination, is filled with dynamic friendships, and often provides the *source* of the content that I later share on Facebook. I do not claim to be representative. But I do say that login is an overly reductive measure of engagement.

As for “reality,” uh, how many of your friends’ Facebook photos look like your friends? About a third of my friends (and myself) have pictures that are expressive of something or other, but not the “real” me in a literal sense.

I am not trying to advocate SL over FB. I love them both. And I see profoundly different business cases for marketing in each. I just like to see a little more nuance precede sweeping conclusions.

So what was factually incorrect? If I have misstated any facts, I will be glad to correct them?

My main point stands; if you’re even thinking of Second Life, you should be in Facebook. I wouldn’t think that’s controversial at all. Not that you shouldn’t think about Second Life, but why would you ignore a platform that has ten times as many active users?