Thursday, July 29, 2010

How To Save Second Life in One Simple Step

Hamlet/Wagner Au posted an article today in Social Times on "How to Save Second Life in Seven Easy Steps." As a responsible pundit, I thought it was my duty to come up with a more efficient approach to save the beleaguered virtual world from doom. Why bother with seven steps when you can get the job done with just one. The 80/20 rule is so pre-millennial.

My brilliant plan takes the core aspects of the most successful social networking and gaming ventures and injects them into a single paradigm-changing action:

Change the name from "Second Life" to "SocialMediaGamingVille 3D!"

Brilliant, huh?  It is much easier to change the name than to change the platform, the culture or even the CEO. This is something we can implement immediately. Since Second Life has almost complete global name recognition, I have to assume that anyone who isn't in there yet has some sort of negative association with the name Second Life. So let's give our world a name that reflects the cutting edge of modern times.

It could work. For the price of a couple thousand business cards and some minor design changes, we can be in business!

5 comments:

Maria Korolov said...

LOL

Salvatore Otoro said...

Wow, it sounds like a super-deluxe version of Farmville.

MarillaAnne Slade said...

OKay! See! Now we know what Botgirl was really trying to coach Philip into saying tomorrow!

Ron T Blechner said...

I'm not surprised Hamlet said this. He's been buddies with Philip and the folks who chose the name "Second Life" and enjoy the thought of Second Life as a fantasy alternate world where people can ditch their first life.

This is, of course, contrary to fact. Treating SL as a social media place, like Facebook, means realizing is NOT about losing one's real identity - quite the opposite. But that just goes to show how little Hamlet views Second Life as a social media tool. He was a game reviewer before he came to Second Life ... so ... that's what he knows.

The truth is that the fundamental thing Second Life needs right now is better, tighter user feedback loops with iterative design. Identify problems, get community feedback, make a drawing of how you'd fix it, get more feedback, make a prototype, get more feedback, make a Beta, test it, release it. What's got to end is this 1-2 year cycles of developing features in secret, asking opinion in the 11th hour and not caring when users come back and tell you that the feature needs radical redesign.

Unknown said...

Very well played.