Hope it helps.

- Kevin

This cute teddy bear is sitting while someone taking its picture. But what will happen when its head been pulled off from the body?

This is really freaking. As you can see in the picture above, the teddy bear’s head has gone from its body. Who…

So what? Why would you care? There was no Amazon, no eBay, no MySpace, no blogs. Just some randomly scattered ramblings, a lot of sex, a few interesting pages. You would just shrug it off, and turn back to the mailing lists and USENET, which was where *real* people were discussing important things, as well as working and doing business. The Web, well, was a cute idea that had some marginal interest (it was easier to download pornography through Mosaic than through the USENET, although not necessarily faster!), but well, it was one of those things: here this day, gone tomorrow. After all, in 1993, the mailing list for Star Trek had been around for some twenty years or so.

And then in 1995 you would crawl on your knees to beg your boss to give you your Web access back.

People “don’t get” Second Life right now — because it’s too new. Sure, it’s a social environment — but one that has not even a million users. How many does MySpace have? Or Friendster, or Orkut? Clearly, getting “banned from Second Life” is unimportant at this stage — there are so many more social environments on the net. Surely SL will be history in a year or two.

Well — and perhaps not. Second Life is, for a huge (and increasing) number of people, something completely different in terms of online presence. It’s a graphical front-end for back-end application servers for running social networks and business. Wait. That’s what the Web is!

Indeed — that’s what Second Life *can* be. It doesn’t mean, right now in 2006, that it is the *major* use for Second Life — like, for instance, e-Business is still NOT the major use of the Web (after well over a decade), although I would admit it’s in the top 10.

It’s also an interactive social environment, where you talk and interact with *people* — not on text pages. Some have argued that “a page in MySpace is an avatar”. Philosophically, it might very well be — but visually, definitely not. It’s going deep into abstraction levels when one assumes that by clicking links on Friendster you’re actually touching or cuddling other human beings. No rational mind would admit to that — they would simply redefine “interaction” to encompass “clicking on links and radio buttons”

But on Second Life (or any other 3D virtual world really), interaction is *different*. Avatars can touch each other, they can watch each other’s expression and body language (no matter how limited it might be), they can do things together, visually, and their common work is much easier to “navigate” than an assortment of stuck-together web pages. People give the example of the Wikipedia and its over a million articles as the ultimate collaborative environment. Second Life has over thirty million objects (probably more) in the same collaborative environment — and, although naturally some take little time to create, and others take months, isn’t it the same with the Wikipedia? (Wikipedia stubs, after all, take 5 minutes to write, but also count to the over-a-million-article total as well)

“Getting” Second Life is truly not easy. It’s so hard, in fact, that the academics at Terra Nova, one of the leading sites on virtual worlds, are seriously discussing if Second Life is a virtual world or not — or simply Web 3.0.