Business and Technology in Second Life

Launched at about the same time as Second Life, There.com used to be seen as “SL’s little brother”. For a long time it used to be compared with Second Life as one of the few serious competitors out there, in the sense that it was a long runner, that outlasted the period of venture capital funding. While the avatars and overall scenario was of inferior quality compared to SL — even in 2004-6 — it had at least three major advantages over SL: vehicles worked quite well; you could have a tighter control over your environment and friends (e.g. “the grieferless utopia”) which made MTV select it over SL for its Virtual Laguna Beach project, alleging that Linden Lab didn’t give MTV the kind of tools to enforce a rigid control over users and content; and it was stupidly simple to use. It also had a way for users to engage with the community and get “ratings” and “goals” to follow doing social activity (something which recently was brought up for SL as well).