For a long long time people bemoaned the fact that Linden Lab did not advertise Second Life. This has changed in the last couple of years, Linden Lab have embraced advertising, but there’s another oddity. Linden Lab aren’t exactly embracing Second Life when it comes to their other products.
For example a search inside Second Life for Desura gives us these results :
If you have to squint, the results for a Desura search within Second Life provides us with “Whoops! Your Everything search for “Desura” did not return any matches” Ok let’s try this again, surely there will be something in Second Life regarding Blocksworld, right? Wrong :
Blocksworld is of course a different product but it seems odd to me that you can’t easily find any information about this product within Second Life, which is Linden Lab’s premier product.
Desura is a different platform too, but Desura actually seems to be a bit more switched on when it comes to being friendly to their sister products.
You will find a listing for Second Life on Desura.
Second Life being on Desura makes sense of course, Desura is a digital distribution platform and you can’t distribute Desura via Second Life. However what you can do with Desura in Second Life is talk about it. Linden Lab could promote it, provide information about it, advertise it beyond the login screen and demonstrate how other companies could promote their products within Second Life, therefore demonstrating a very good use case of Second Life.
The now defunct Dio and Versu products may well have benefited from an inworld presence, particularly in terms of discussions. Emily Short of Versu fame takes part in discussions about interactive fiction, sometimes in the UK, sometimes in the USA. Second Life would be a great platform for such discussions because people from all around the world could take part in them, that’s one of the beauties of the virtual world, it knocks down the barrier of distance.
The same goes for Dio, people could have discussed Dio, maybe even entering discussions with the devs and via that discussion word could have spread about Dio, meaning more people may have taken an interest in the product.
Of course some discussions are better face to face, there’s added richness from face to face discussions and then of course there’s the issue of whether the devs would have time to organise and attend discussions inworld.
However it remains an odd omission in my opinion, for Linden Lab to not be using Second Life to advertise their other products, a Linden Lab island would be a start, whereby they could use the feature rich possibilities of a 3D world to advertise their own wares and at the same time, advertise Second Life as being a suitable product to promote wares in general.
LL silo their products.
When I questioned why announcements relating to other products aren’t promoted via the SL blog, etc., I was told that LL don’t believe SL users are interested in the company’s other product offerings. Thus, the need to promote them through SL properties wasn’t seen as needed – or wanted by SL users.
I don’t agree with this view, but given the amount of backlash that can be voiced by SL users when referencing LL’s other products, I can understand how it came to pass.
I can understand them not blogging about them via the SL website, although I do think this makes an argument for them having an LL blog in general. For example I found out more about Versu from Emily Short’s personal site than I did from the Versu site itself or LL’s press releases.
However when it comes to an inworld presence, Linden Lab should not worry what users think, SL is a platform open to discussion, technology and developments, those interested in said products will visit a Linden Lab sim, some may even find out about the products by someone telling them about said sim.
Senderov and Grey would have problems selling water in a desert.
Pep (suggests that Ebbe initiates a little involuntary attrition, and replaces them with real professionals.)
Senderov sounds like someone who plays for The Arsenal. This is a marketing opportunity.
Perhaps we could persuade Arsene Wenger to sign Mrs Senderov. He did recently buy someone who was injured and unable to play for six months, which is comparable to the contribution that LL’s Marketing VP has made to SL’s growth in the last couple of years.
Pep (She’s an “online shopping expert”, which is also my 16 year old daughter’s Twitter tagline.)
My 2 cents!
Im on Second Life for more then 4 years and i dont wish to know any about any but Second Life!
I don’t have time for any else, Period!