Is Second Life the future of Collaboration and Social Software?

Just like the early stages of MySpace — arguably now THE largest community with a purported 100 million registrants — Second Life is seemingly getting alot of attention from brands trying to create a beachhead within the metaverse since so many people are flocking to this very well executed virtual space.

Diverse brands are attempting to get in front of the thought leaders within Second Life specifically:

• Starwood Hotels is constructing a new hotel in-world
• A PR firm, Text100, opens “an office”
• Rock group DuranDuran is planning shows and U2 already has

…and there are many more. If you want to read more about my thoughts surrounding Second Life and Collaboration, etc., take a peek at this post from June.

But what if you could talk and fully collaborate with anyone online regardless of language?

Here’s something that I came across today that is one of the most profound developments I’ve seen yet that made me stop and think about the real-time collaborative impacts of virtual meetings, discussions, and human interactions as the world flattens and humankind is connected: on–the-fly language translation! I could go on and on but this YouTube video does a much better job of explaining it (and means much more if you’ve been in-world at Second Life…but it’s still amazing either way).

Second Life is free and your only investment is the time it takes to poke around and get your head in to the context of this virtual world game. Even if you don’t invest any time ongoing, you owe it to yourself to at least peek at the future. The connection of our psyche, our spirit and our intrinsic value — vs. our clothes, car, skin color, language or other human elements that often get in the way of focusing on each other as people, on an idea or the solution to a problem — will ultimately be the overall value of an increasingly connected world and one that seems only able to be manifested with a richer, deeper immersive virtual space.