I don’t think I need to explain how open standards have facilitated the growth and acceptance of the web. Yet, one disturbing element of Second Life that differs from the web is the lack of an underlying value of openness over “intellectual property”. Richard Stallman argues that the very term intellectual property is a term that corporations readily co-opt and abuse. No surprise then that Linden Labs, in their official announcement on OpenSim interoperability, state that “intellectual property is the engine that drives Second Life”; not openness, sharing, social engagement, creativity or passion.

Friends of mine who are daily Second Life users describe it as just another social networking site – just another place to chat with their friends, buy a cool outfit and have a nice house too. In this way, one can see that the real value of Second Life is in making synthetic worlds accessible. While the initial openness of the web allowed anyone to write html and make websites, one could argue that it was only with MySpace that a true explosion of web authoring took place. MySpace allowed every kid to suddenly have a web page because of the combination of simplicity (fill out this form, pick your song here, upload your photo here) and social value (express your vanity here, look good to your friends here, show how cool you are here). Second Life does something similar; playing to sociability and degrees of vanity through the use of an easy interface designed primarily for creating and buying 3D objects. Perhaps Google’s Lively will demonstrate whether ease of use and a lack of catering for creativity is the adoption benchmark for the next synthetic world interface.