By now, you probably have heard of Second Life, the popular 3D virtual world that allows its residents to live, interact, buy/sell, and collaborate all under a virtual identity. Where these residents lived, real-world companies have been experimenting too. In my research with Dr. Bill Judge, we have seen more than 50 of the Global Fortune 500 companies who have established an official presence in Second Life. We spoke with some of these companies to find out what drove them to Second Life, how they use it, and how they have benefited from it. Here is a quick summary of what we found:

1. Why Companies Enter Second Life?

Most of the companies we surveyed/interviewed entered SL in 2006. The decision to enter SL varied from an innovative mentality to jumping onto the wagon under competitive pressure. Usually, an individual or a small team of employees were personally involved in SL at first, and they eventually became champions within the company. Interestingly, European companies’ decision to enter SL were driven more by potential for media exposure rather than by the actual functionality or use of the virtual world itself, suggesting important cross-cultural differences in corporate innovation.

2. What Companies Use Second Life for?

Below are six ways the companies have been using SL, ranked by their popularity. The list makes it obvious that communication and learning represent important uses of SL.

3. How Do Companies Benefit from Second Life?

Most companies considered their SL venture to be worthwhile, although only one-third of them acknowledged realizing financial gains. Here is a list of the benefits companies believe they have received from their SL presence, ranked from most-often mentioned to least mentioned:

What do you think about these findings? Has your company ever experimented with Second Life?  I’d love to hear about your experience.

In this post, I am diverting from my main blog theme to share a technical issue that I encountered with Wordpress.  Tonight, I opened up Wordpress to write a new blog.  To my dismay, the administrative pages for Wordpress showed up as completely blank pages, even though my actual blog was displayed correctly.  After searching the Internet and going through a few trials and errors, I finally found the solution to the problem: the functions.php file in the folder that contains the theme used cannot have blank lines on the top or at the bottom.  Deleting those blank spaces brought my administrative pages back.  I’m sharing this with my readers in case anyone runs into the same problem in the future.  During my research, I also learned that another common reason for such blank pages is the wp-cache plug-in. More information about that issue can be found at http://ibloggedthis.com/2006/05/28/wordpress-caching-wp-cache-plugin-blank-page-bug-fix/.

Partly due to celebrity involvement, Twitter has quickly gained popularity in the last few months. According to eMarketer, various online metrics firms reported an approximately ten-fold increase in unique Twitter visitors from February 2008 to February 2009. With the rise in popularity, news broke out that quite a few major firms, including Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Newscorp, are eyeing to buy out Twitter.

Should Twitter sell out when it is still hot? My answer to this question is no. Here’s why. Twitter, just as Wikipedia and Facebook, didn’t start out as a major corporation. Rather, it is built over time through the participation and faith of its users. What makes Twitter precious in consumers’ mind is the community that it has created. The value of the Twitter brand name is not in the company itself, but in all the people who contribute fantastic and interesting content on the fly and in the way it is able to connect people with each other. Now adding a suit and tie image and a clear profit motive that is usually associated with large corporations, it will simply clash with Twitter’s current brand image and turn off the goodwill it has engendered among its users. Twitter from Microsoft (or Google or News Corp.) just doesn’t sound right.

One might argue that YouTube got bought out by Google and it is still popular. But that acquisition has yet to prove beneficial to Google money-wise. It is estimated that YouTube will lose $470 million in 2009, on sales of $240 million. Plus, it is also facing pressure from Hulu.com, another video website that has successfully struck business deals with major networks recently, including a stake taken by Discovery. Piecing these events together, the future of YouTube is quite uncertain.

Of course, Twitter is going to face the same question too in terms of how it is going to support itself financially if it were to remain independent. To answer that question, one has to look at the value and competency that Twitter possesses. At least two areas emerge. One is information. By millions of people feeding news, facts, and opinions into Twitter in real-time, Twitter has become an information network that is no less powerful than a major news network. This can be powerful knowledge to news organizations (for breaking news), marketers (for customer opinions) and the like. One way for Twitter to make money in this area is perhaps to develop as an information expert, helping these potential beneficiaries extract and analyze the useful data. For example, a platform can be established to combine tweets with Twitter traffic information to better understand what is on the collective mind. A second area that Twitter can explore is its technology expertise. Using the basic Twitter platform, it can develop customized platforms that satisfy companies’ internal messaging needs, similar to what Yammer is doing but perhaps in a more proprietary and customized fashion. Such customized platforms can facilitate efficient and secure communication within an organization (e.g., between salespeople).

Of course, the smart minds at Twitter might think of other ways of making money. But whichever way it ends up making money, I simply do not think it is a good idea for Twitter to sell to any of these large corporations. And the company seems to agree, when Twitter’s co-founder Biz Stone said “We Are Not For Sale”.