Second Life as the quantum conversation generator

As you may know (if following my tweets for instance), in the last 3 weeks I spent a good share of my time off exploring Second Life. I used to subscribe almost one year ago, but at that time I just logged in, pretended to bypass the newbie tutorials and… got bored in a matter of minutes: couldn’t find anything interesting to do, just kept stumbling in casinos and virtual brothels.

So what hooked me in this time?
One thing, for sure, is the chance to build.
It took me some time to get used to the building interface, but when you start assembling pieces together it’s like being gifted with a box of LEGO with virtually infinite bricks.
The chance for scripting and integrating it with the 2d web then makes it even more fun and adds some potential for actually useful stuff.

But what’s killer here is the fact that

building conversations! If blog gave a voice to everybody and the chance for the active users to participate in a conversation, virtual worlds, by the mean of giving a visible presence to all users, actually creates a scenario where also lurkers can be easily spotted and involved in the conversation: it’s a media where the message can be changed just by looking at it… or, in other words, a quantum conversation generator :)
More over, while in the blogosphere the host (blog owner) is inherently part of the conversation itself and can act (in case of moderated comments for instance) as a moderator, in a virtual world a specific “place” becomes just the context from which the conversation springs.

And yes, you lose asynchronicity. But let’s keep that for a future conversation.