Thursday 2 July 2009

Twitter versus Second Life

After reading Sheila Webber's post about What Librarians think about Second Life, I can't resist mentioning a rather mischievous post I was reading this morning about Twitter and Second Life by Chris Abraham "Twitter Is What Second Life Wasn't: Light, Cheap and Open And That's Why It'll Outlive the Hype Cycle". (I hope she will forgive me!)

He starts with admitting there's a lot of hype about Twitter at the moment and this may be reminiscent how it was with Second Life. But it's different
"Twitter is light, cheap, open and permanent, whereas Second Life is heavy, expensive, closed and ephemeral. Twitter does things right where Second Life failed."
There's some discussion at the end and I guess it's not a fair comparison, but it's a good read.

2 comments:

library2.0 said...

Maybe twitter is the future, but Phil Bradley makes a succint point (http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2009/07/why-re-tweeting-is-going-to-kill-twitter.html), when he discusses the dirth of re-tweets for commercial purposes being spam. Or habitat using the hash tags of the iranian election (http://librarytwopointzero.blogspot.com/2009/06/big-business-makes-poor-decisions.html)? Twitter is not without its faults......

Sheila Webber said...

Sorry, reading this a bit belatedly!
Yes, I certainly forgive, since the idea that you have to play one off against the other seems pretty pointless - people use some kind of digital devices to access both but it's really apples and pears, or more like apples and an orchard of mixed fruit trees with a cider press attached. You can twitter comments about a conference, but you actually HAVE full conferences in SL (for example, there were over a 1000 at the VW Best Practices in Education conference that was just held in SL). SL is not good for passing round short messages to people quickly but you can communicate in text (most people do), and Twitter has no capability to represent things visually, let alone in 3D ... basically they each have their uses. Presumably this chap has column inches to fill and has to rant about something on a regular basis ;-)