SecondLife: New Wave, My Predictions

More than three years back, someone started a virtual life community, SecondLife, where anyone can create his/her virtual persona/character and it develops a community. Soon I forgot about it, but it didn’t end there. A few months back, one of my friend came and told me how much he loved Secondlife and how it had evolved - you can buy a piece of virtual land, so many companies had opened virtual stores and virtual shoes, cloths could be bought for your virtual life; they even started their own currency. He loved it so much and had become addicted to it. This was frustrating to me, why the hell people were spending so much time to make themselves up in virtual life? What gratification they got doing by wasting time in creating virtual characters and dressing them up.

It was freaky to find so many young people indulging in it and mostly Americans; I lost no time in terming them as childish and the ones who were more hooked to the virtual life than the real one. Anyways, even that didn’t put the issue to the rest. Few days earlier I saw a report - some hotshot from IBM was telling that they had developed a system wherein people can send sms to virtual characters and users could also transmit the sms to people using their virtual life characters, and added that this would set stage for next level evolution of communication in virtual and real world.

Well, when I thought this fad would die its natural death, it came back and probably it may grow even bigger this time. Then I started thinking what else it could evolve to? So, here is my take on what this virtual world can evolve to! People would surely enjoy reading and sending sms for time being through Secondlife though such effort may not last but who knows it may evolve to mms video massages of SecondLife characters speaking to you. If something like that happens I bet it would be a big hit, people would love watching animated videos of their characters. I guess most of people would be sending weird and freaky massages, specially the times when people are angry with someone.

But what if SecondLife also becomes an alternative to e-cards and people start wishing each other through their characters (specially those valentine ones, guys would get a better tool to purpose- really hidden virtually visible), I think that will nail e-cards business out of business. If something like that ever happens it won’t be limited to a few such offerings. If people become so hooked to sms on SecondLife then they might also like reading their massages on SecondLife with each character reading out the massage, what if you open your mail and your boss says “you are promoted”, I believe such stuff would be a real rage and it would pose serious challenges to e-mail providers like yahoo or hotmail.

Such developments may lead to a lot of such companies starting up their own virtual life portals to protect their market. I know most of you people now will not believe if I say all the social network sites may start using virtual life characters to make it more exciting or SecondLife itself may become social network site like Orkut where every user would have animated character and can talk to other, I know its kind of weird but it may have a future prospect. Then the real and virtual life would get immersed(or, shall I say, messed up) in each and there would be a thin line to differentiate.

But this is not all, my biggest out of the world idea is, if companies start verifying virtual characters just like the online signature and then you can shop online in real life using your virtual life character, man that would be massive, it will blow everyone’s mind. I know most of you reading this may feel like banging their head on wall but what if it really happens, I know most of it wont happen any soon but probably some will in next few years.