Last question until we get back to question 6 in a week or so.

Why on earth do people use sites like Second Life?

People use second life for a variety of reasons, including:

Marketing Potential
â?¢ Neville Hobson
â?¢ Darren Barefoot
â?¢ Harvard Business Review

Education
â?¢ Enhanced classroom experience
â?¢ Secondary education applications
â?¢ Other learning applications

Business advancement
â?¢ Internal and external communications (links to YouTube)
â?¢ Public input
â?¢ Customer service
â?¢ Corporate training

Case Study
â?¢ U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Companies with a presence in SL
â?¢ Crayon
â?¢ Coke
â?¢ Reuters
â?¢ Major League Baseball
â?¢ American Apparel
â?¢ Other brands/businesses

Charities/Non-profit/Museums (via TechSoup)
â?¢ American Cancer Society
â?¢ San Jose Tech Museum
â?¢ The George Eastman House
â?¢ Other non profits

Other (also via TechSoup)
â?¢ Physically disabled people

All in all, I still think it boils down to one thing: connections. People go into SL looking to connect in ways they canâ??t in real life. You can congregate with people from all over the world in organized fashion or randomly. You can share ideas. You can lead events. Teach. Inform. Touch.

Second Life isnâ??t for everybody, but the people who do take advantage of this unique world can come out of it better for the experience.

The key to approaching avatars in SL is the same as in real life: build trust, seek permission and work hard to keep them both.

TechCrunch links over to the Second Life Census and sums it up quickly. My key takeaway from this:

â??At any given time, ten to thirty thousand of those users are online and logged in to the world.â?�

Some of them are spending money, others are just there to connect. I attended my first Coffee With Crayon session last Thursday morning and found the experience to be very cool. Just a bunch of like-minded people standing around and talking. Only these are people I may never have had the opportunity to meet without connecting first in SL.

Iâ??m sure that people find SL boring, or donâ??t get the point of it. (Just read the comments to the TechCrunch post for proof.) And maybe Iâ??m oversimplifying things. But if you want full value, I recommend going in with someone you know who has been living there for a while and getting them to show you around. Then go off on your own and meet some people. Join a conference. Or observe it from a distance.

Sooner or later, youâ??ll get it. Hopefully.

Related stuff:

â?¢ Updated Second Life economy stats.

â?¢ Excellent post over at the Corante blog asking â??what are the real numbers?â?�

â?¢ SL stats-related social bookmarking pages: del.icio.us, reddit.

Iâ??ve been floating around Second Life for a few days now. Not often, but enough to check things out. (Here I am sitting atop the scoreboard of the yet-to-be-built-in-real-life Yankee Stadium II. Very cool.)

More importantly, Iâ??ve been reading up. The debate going on now is all about SLâ??s economy. This post by Randolph Harrison (discovered via the MIT Adlab) has ignited quite a heated discussion. Hereâ??s a quote, which comes after an interesting presentation of specific economic problems within SL:

â??As we scratched our heads trying to figure out if there werenâ??t a more clever way of disguising our trades, or perhaps creating our own in-game banks and exchanges in order to arbitrage the other direction, it suddenly dawned upon me. This game was just a pyramid scheme.â?�

Scroll down to the comments and follow the conversation. There are many people who defend SLâ??s economy, using numbers thatâ??ll make you salivate. All convincing arguments for SL not being a pyramid scheme at all.

All this, though, has made me wonder what the true value of participating in SL is. Based on what Iâ??ve seen, heard and read, I really think it comes down to connections. For example:

â?¢ Crayonville hosting Coffee with Crayon every Thursday morning or the Podcast Conference I joined (albeit for a very brief visit) the other night.

â?¢ Reuters hosting regular conferences at their in-world Press Center.

â?¢ Sweden opening an embassy.

â?¢ Regular marketing conferences.

â?¢ In-world product launches, like Vista.

What do all these examples have in common? Theyâ??re all events driven to bring people together, get them talking, meeting and interacting. And theyâ??re all events that you wouldnâ??t otherwise have the opportunity to attend if they were taking place in the real world.

Ask yourself these questions as you venture through SL:

â?¢ How many people have you met?

â?¢ How many of these people could you turn to for advice and help?

â?¢ How many people have turned to you for the same?

If thereâ??s an ROI to be calculated, maybe itâ??s in the value SL gives you in the real world, through relationships you may never have formed otherwise. Much like your blog, LinkedIn and other social networking services do for you.

Sure you can make whatever coin you like in-world, but, like all other social media, I see the true value coming from the connections youâ??re making, and the business credibility youâ??ll gain as a result.

Related stuff:

â?¢ Edward Castronova argues against the ponzi scheme whitepaper.

â?¢ Valleywag comments on the Harrison post.

â?¢ Second Life Insider comments on the Valleywag post.

P.S. I would really love a tour of SL by a real insider. Any volunteers?

This is cool.

Had a client meeting tonight. Weâ??re sitting discussing plans for his new site and he, letâ??s call him Sandor, mentions that he got hooked on Second Life during a recent trip to visit family in Hungary. He pulls out his laptop, shows me around. Minutes later, I follow suit and sign up for an account.

Not 20 minutes later, in a coffee shop next to the Crayonville, I meet the immortal Divo Dapto â?? the mentor I never met. We had a quick chat. He invited me drop in on Coffee with Crayon next week â?? one of my actual motivations for joining. Our talk was short, sweet â?? and very cool.

Twenty minutes. Thatâ??s all it took to learn just how small this world (both of â??em) really is.

If youâ??re hanging around, look me up. My SL friends call me Forest Radford.

I’ll share more experiences as we go along. Looking forward to meeting you.

Related stuff:

â?¢ Learn how to get started in Second Life (from Second Thoughts) and how to get started in business (from SL).

â?¢ Read about the powerful SL economy, CNET News, BL Ochman.

â?¢ Mainstream media articles: BusinessWeek, Wired, Popular Science, CNNMoney, Boston Globe.

â?¢ Recent blog mentions: BusinessBlog Consulting, GigaGamez, ZDNet.

â?¢ Check out Reuters Second Life News Center.

â?¢ Linden Labâ??s official site.