Chris Car

Just found an interesting interview with Philip Rosedale, who is the founder and CEO of Second Life. His job is - as he said - to explain what Second Life actually is:

Ask yourself this: if I came to you and I told you I had a product to sell you, and this product was this magical non-technological thing where every day you could go into a quiet room in your house and you could close your eyes and open them again, finding yourself in the body of another person. A person who lives somewhere else, a totally different person. You can walk around in that person’s life and do whatever you like. Make money, get married, start a business. How much would you pay for that? Is that compelling? Even if I told you that you couldn’t choose who you were going to be? You’d still want to do it. That’s interesting, our desires to be and become someone else. I find that fascinating.

He mentioned some interesting numbers about Second Life: in 2006 there are 9,000 landowners, 80 sq miles, about as big as Amsterdam, 20 million objects, 20 terabytes of user created content, 13 teraflops of simulation. Wow. And Second Life is built of about 3,000 servers. Sorry, I am a tech freak sometimes, this sounds so impressive to me!

The type of person using Second Life is almost gender balanced, early adopters but not necessarily a programmer or technologists. 44% is female usage… 36% of signups are women, but when you look at usage hours, women use Second Life so much more than men do, to the degree that 44% of the usage hours are by women.

Interesting. Are men not good at expressing themselves visually, in a 3D envirionment? Or do most of men think that Second Life is more like a “female thing”?

Link (via WMMNA)