A headline of this weeks (Dutch) news the ‘Vrije Universiteit wil open its doors in SecondLife’, to do research on the effects of virtual life on real life and to offer online classes and interaction. It seems like there are more organizations in SecondLife than there are actual users..

Dutch bank ABN AMRO has opened a building in SecondLife, ‘so their customers could interact with ABN AMRO in the virtual world’ but in their little SecondLife palace there is no-one that represents ABN AMRO, maybe someone should explain interaction to them..

The last two weeks I’ve received two e-mails from SecondLife users that they want me to join their group, I have tried SecondLife once for thirty minutes about a year ago, thought it was boring and left, but apparantly I am still counted as an active user. I just don’t understand why SecondLife get so much media attention. World of Warcraft has 8 million (active) users, but is portrayed as a Geek-thing, Xbox Life has a very large online community, but that’s a Gamer-thing.  SecondLife’s only purpose seems to be to let lonely nerds interact (talk about sex) and pay a lot for just about everything, just because it’s advertiser-friendly the media is jumping all over it, makes you wonder..

On the last episode of TWiT, SecondLife is described as ‘a sandbox-game, but you can’t shoot anyone, everything costs money and there are a lot of prostitutes’, hmm sounds like the world of marketing to me..