Lee’s Second Life - “Finding the key”

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Gary Hayes (Gary Hazlitt in SL) copped some flack a while back for proclaiming BigPond and ABC islands to be ‘big’ players in the SL ecosphere. For those who don’t know, Gary’s TheProjectFactory built both ABC Island and the Pond series of islands.

Now here’s the proof: according to Tateru Nino and as reported by Wagner James Au, The Pond is the most visited ‘mixed reality’ space in SL (meaning that it is a representation or reflection of a real world business/person/entity).

The Pond enjoys an average of 53 visitors per hours and a total of over 9,000 unique visitors per week.

As WJA says:

Corporations have tried a wide variety of traditional marketing gimmicks on the Residents of Second Life to get them to come and drink the corporate KoolAid. Marketers have tried ignoring them, insulting them, misunderstanding them and bribing them.

The Pond, on the other hand, is following in the footsteps of Showtime’s The L Word, and renting living space to residents. The terms and conditions smack a little strongly of contractual legalese but, the basic conditions set out all make sense. Judging by the boost in traffic throughout The Pond since the commencement of the rental plan, this plan certainly seems to be something of a hit.

Ultimately The Pond is delivering what seems to be good value at a fair price, and even if it isn’t the sort of product traditionally associated with them, goodwill is goodwill.

Indeed, ‘goodwill’ is ‘goodwill’ no matter how you might slice and dice it and/or attempt to discredit it.

Sure, if you are a bigpond broadband user you can get your hefty SL download for free (no bandwidth metering) and once you join you get taken to the Pond, but it’s still a fair number of people who are looking at what the Pond is doing.

I thought about renting a space there to use as an office, but in the end decided that it was too ‘beachy’ for me (I’m a ‘hills’ man myself); my search for suitable office space continues apace.