Second Life is fashionable and in the news. This fact has not escaped the notice of some firms which have engaged their own consultants to organise their presence in the “new world”. So far the conquest of the promised land has occurred through the colonisation of virtual islands, on which prestigious and striking buildings have been constructed which are exactly identical to those in the real world: office blocks, auditoria, retail centres.
This might be considered a disarmingly superficial and dull approach. Nonetheless, we must remember that it takes time for a new medium to develop its own form of expression. For example, it took around ten years for the clear emergence of the collective intelligence phenomena which are typical of many Web 2.0 applications. At the end of the 1990s, most effort was focussed on migrating mass media models to the web: an example were the large general purpose portals where “the content was king”, and which today have been replaced by social networks, where value is produced from the relational network among users.
The business colonisers on Second Life have the same approach as their predecessors ten years earlier on the web and, moreover, insist on offering their stuffy and user-repellent sites. Since the metaverse reflects the real one with an added dreamlike state, they build a square, auditorium or office block.
If, on the other hand, we adopted a slightly more sophisticated viewpoint, we could design buildings in which a floor – given that it no longer has the function it fulfils in real life – could be used, for example, as a tool to help a group take decisions. This is the approach being followed by the researchers of the Sociable Media Group at MIT, who invent forms of architecture which perform new social functions. Tools which are used by avatars, but which – it should be remembered – help the users they represent.
Many indulge in fantasies which place the metaverse in a parallel and almost independent dimension compared to the real world. By doing so they underestimate the fact that Second Life is above all a social environment populated by real users who interact through their avatars. When people are offline, the avatars do not exist. That is why you often have the impression of visiting sparsely inhabited locations: every day just a few tens of thousands of users worldwide are online at the same time. The population of Italian avatars is fairly limited: according to the official figures from Linden there were just under 25,000 active users in May.
It is likely that the approach adopted by companies, together with the current size of Second Life, will swiftly bring disappointment to this first wave of business colonisers. Some will consider a failure of the metaverse as a business phenomenon: whereas in fact the role of pioneers is to commit errors on which those who follow them can build their success.

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