The age gap

Age is just a number said someone who hasn't experienced the strangeness of hairs appearing in places that hair simply shouldn't grow, or has experienced the inexplicable oddity of nasal hair that grows at rates that make you think it's some sort of alien technology.

However a couple of articles in the newspapers have caught my eye this week. One in the Torygraph, I mean Telegraph, takes a sideswipe whilst the Guardian posts an article about educational conferencing.

Now these unrelated articles tell a story underneath the surface. The Telegraph article is about internet addiction and contains the following off the cuff comment:

"Sure, the armies of people that spend all day, every day on Second Life
really do need to get out more, but isn’t all that time on Facebook
actually a necessary part of organising an evening out for almost
anybody under 30?"

There you have it. Second Life isn't trendy for the under 30's? Quite possibly true, I don't meet that many people under 30, I certainly  don't see many under 25, except those eighteen year old, "I'm legal honest" strippers who are probably a 53 year old guy called Burt from Idaho.

The Guardian article : "Is this the future of the academic conference?" on the other hand discusses the usefulness of Second Life for an education conference. The author however remains sceptical, but adds:

"Will it catch on? I'm sceptical, but then I didn't see the point of email at first."

The issue of cost savings is an important one, but the point is that the people who get excited about Second Life in education are not the students. The article is all about potential, Second Life is full of potential. One day newspapers the world over will realise it's "Linden Lab" rather than "Linden Labs" but that will be sometime in the future, probably around the time Linden Lab themselves remember they instigated a discussion about Openspaces and forgot to respond but I digress.

I don't really care that Facebook is considered trendy and Second Life isn't. I don't like Facebook or Myspace but they have their place and are useful to those who use them. Second Life is useful to me and I don't mind if it's full of thirtysomethings, that's part of the appeal. This is one of the reasons I hope they never merge the grids.

Linden Lab have a product here that appeals to a very wide spectrum of users, they have a market that a lot of companies aren't interested in. They should love, honour and cherish this userbase because they're onto something here. We aren't going away, we can be rational, we do still throw temper tantrums but we calm down quicker and give it another go.

Whether this was Linden Lab's intent or not, it's where we're at. Sometimes we don't thrill you, sometimes we think we'll kill you, but don't let us fuck up will you, because when we need a friend it's still you.