A discussion about SL on LinkedIn contains this thoughtful post by John Jainschigg:
'SL has scale limitations. You can't get more than 100 people on a very (very!) well-designed sim. So it's impossible for an SL environment to serve nearly the number of people that even a tiny conventional website can.
This is obvious -- and it's also not the point. The point of SL is direct, person-to-person and person-to-group and person-to-environment synchronous engagement, which is of infinitely greater intrinsic and leveragable value than a web impression. And engagement within super-large groups is meaningless.
SL also lacks consistent and effective mechanisms for communicating with the inworld audience. So people who want to drive audience to events or presentations are obliged to work very hard to leverage these mechanisms, plus word-of-mouth. And in doing so, they contend with enormous competition for audience attention and time -- which turns out, primarily, to be misguided competition, since people who are in SL to experiment with fashion are rarely also there to learn about biotechnology products.
All this is known. The population of SL is the size of a very small US city, like Peoria. And there's a reason that The National Gallery and the National Museum of Science and the headquarters of Goldman Sachs and Facebook and the National Opera are not in Peoria. That's not Peoria's fault. In fact, I'd like to live in Peoria, just to get away from freakin' Goldman Sachs, if for no other reason. My point, however, is that it doesn't make sense to complain that Peoria isn't as big as New York or LA, so doesn't "organically" support a million businesses and spectacles requiring attention.
The obvious solution is to drive traffic from the web, which is easy to do using social media and email and SEO and AdWords and other normal promotional methods. You set yourself up on the web so you're seen by search engines, and then you drive people into SL to see your stuff. What is hard about this? And how is your inability or unwillingness to do it somehow SL's fault?'
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