Second Life and Online Shopping

Image via Wikipedia

This week in class we tried out using Second Life. We created our own avatars, customized their appearance, and then explored the digital world. But, frankly, I didn’t like it at all.

Customizing my avatar’s appearance was a chore because it never did quite what I wanted, and at one point my avatar’s skirt was floating 3 feet in front of her… And even walking in Second Life is extremely difficult because the graphics take such a long time to load.

However, even if all of these pitfalls were corrected, I still don’t see the point of the average person using it to just hang out. Maybe it has some benefits to the business world, but I don’t see why hanging out and exploring a world with complete strangers is so appealing. I understand that there is some level of social interaction, but not nearly as much as on other social networking sites, like Facebook. For this reason, I don’t think that Second Life will ever become as mainstream as Facebook, but I think the idea can be built upon and can provide some benefit in the future.

An example of an area where the concepts presented in Second Life can be useful is in the realm of online shopping. I just read an article today about how online stores are thinking about changing their layouts to look more like Second Life and allowing their users to create their own avatars. The avatars can walk around the store and try on different outfits, so the buyer can get more of an idea of how it will look. Customers can even meet up with other friends online to go shopping together! This in turn will increase sales, because customers will feel more certain about their purchases, and retailers can see how popular certain clothing items are by seeing how many times it was “tried on.”

While I personally do not think that Second Life itself will grow much larger, I am very interested in seeing the possible future benefits that it can bring.