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For SLReports.net Sunday FrontPage Creator Phillip Linden Speaks to the Telegraph....
The Creator of Second Life, Phillip Linden (RL: Phillip Rosedale), described the genesis and his view of the future for the Virtual World recently.
In an interview with Britain's Telegraph, Linden explained how Second Life was the culmination of a lifetime of work, going back to childhood, as Linden had early ambitions of creating a virtual world that mirrored the real world as far as computer modeling of Physics. His first company which he founded at age 17, FreeVue, financed his college education at University of California in San Diego and later sold to Real Networks, which he then joined as Chief Technology Officer.
Later, after advances in computer chip technology made Linden's early vision possible, Linden financed the first 18 months of Linden Lab's with his own money before venture firm Benchmark Captial bought in.
"If you look at internet traffic today," said Linden, "the largest proportion of it is websites; the second largest is email. My prediction is that in 10 years time, the largest fraction of internet traffic will be people walking around in virtual worlds like Second Life. The web will continue to grow but the ability to do the website thing in 3D with other people there is going to be the more compelling solution."
"There are so many things that are wonderful or just plain strange. The big thing that's different is that your identity and the environment around you is easier to modify and therefore you can be engaged in much more of that kind of creative activity and modification than in the real world. There was a guy who lost 70lbs after going on Second Life. He said that every day he was tweaking something on Second Life to make it a little bit better and he got up one morning and was struck by the point that it couldn't be all that hard to make real life changes to himself so he started working out. It's really interesting." Linden discounts recent negative publicity raised by certain individuals who have had negative repercussions on their Real Life and RL relationships, "Second Life has made a lot more marriages than divorces. A lot of people partner in Second Life and then get together in the real world. I get a lot of emails from people that are heartwarming, telling me how Second Life changed their life...Is stuff actually real enough in there for it to have that kind of impact on people? The answer for a substantial number of people is 'yes'."
"Second Life is fundamentally a new medium and there's a history of people adapting new media," Mr Rosedale says. "It happened with the internet, email, instant messaging and with TV and radio. Things happen in stages. If you look at the internet, selling things over it didn't happen for some time but what happened with Second Life is that a lot of companies jumped in and tried to do late-stage commercial e-commerce stuff really early on. They found that was inappropriate at the early stage of the market but a lot of companies are coming back now and using it for collaborative, internal capabilities. There are companies interviewing and recruiting in Second Life and using it in education. In Canada, they're training real-life border control agents on Second Life. There are enormous cost and environmental benefits to operating in Second Life. Companies are going to figure out how to use it to sell things to their end users."
"When the real world becomes more difficult, there's a tendency to look at alternatives. It's not just escapist. From every perspective, Second Life is a very interesting alternative to reality."
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