The last installment of Deliberations' social networking guide ended with sharing sites. Let's pick up there.
Bookmarking sites
Bookmarking sites are sharing sites too, but there are so many of them and they're so powerful that they're worth talking about separately. Bookmarking users share things they've found on line -- news stories, blog posts, web sites. Other users get their news from the resulting flood of stories, and they in turn flag stories they like. As in other sharing sites, each user has an individual page where you can look at stories that user has shared.
These sites are big. On Digg, one of the leading bookmarking sites, the top story of the last 24 hours has been "dugg" almost 3,000 times as I write this. When somebody put one of my posts on Reddit, my page hits tripled, and stayed up there for three days.
Examples of the dozens of sites like this are:
Many feed readers have a "shared stories" feature that works like a bookmarking site. Deliberations' "In The News" feature consists of the stories I tag for sharing in Google Reader.
Games
Wikipedia has a separate entry for "massively multiplayer online role-playing game," or MMORPG. It's a game in which "a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world," each living the life of a fictional character. The Wikipedia entry claims there were more than 15 million memberships in these games in 2006. Your character usually has a defined and changing personality, joins groups and makes alliances with others, and keeps interacting even when you're not playing the game. Some of the biggest MMORPGs are:
- World of Warcraft -- you're fighting your way through the fantasy world of Azeroth
- Omerta -- you're a gangster
- EVE Online -- you're in space
- World of Pirates -- you're a pirate, naturally
It's not all swash and buckle. You can post a profile with a picture in your online bridge club, spend the evening (or all night) getting to know the rest of your foursome, and head off to the chat room when you're the dummy. There are online multi-player games of all kinds, from chess to poker, where people are getting to know each other or some virtual projection of each other. You can also bond with those who would rather watch than play; 19.4 million people were playing fantasy sports games in August 2007, the Fantasy Sports Trade Association reported.
Second Life
Second Life is -- how to explain Second Life? It's an online world, "a 3-D virtual world entirely created by its Residents," the Second Life people say. As I write this on a Sunday evening in October 2007, there are more than 37,000 people directing their "avatars" through the events of their days and nights in Second Life. In the last 60 days, almost 1.3 million people have logged in, and there are over 10 million "Residents" of Second Life's world.
Isn't that just a MMORPG, you'll ask, now that you know what a MMORPG is? No, say the Second Life folks, for two reasons. First is ownership. You own what you create in Second Life, and as the Illinois Business Law Journal reported in September, this means there is an active economy not only in virtual currency but also in actual currency for virtual property. (Read that again slowly. People are paying each other actual money for the right to own stuff that exists only on an Internet web site.) Second is flexibility. Second Life isn't a gangster world or a pirate world, it's a world:
If you want to hang out with your friends in a garden or nightclub, you can. If you want to go shopping or fight dragons, you can. If you want to start a business, create a game or build a skyscraper you can.
It's hard to convey how huge this thing is, and how closely it is interweaving itself with the thing we (so far still) call "real" life. Real professors teach seminars in Second Life classrooms, and students' avatars show up to listen. Yesterday, Timothy Zick guest-blogged at Concurring Opinions about a "Free Burma" event at Second Life, "which featured a 'human chain' event in which 500 people from 20 countries joined, as well as vigils and meditations in support of this cause." The event left Zick (and at least one thoughtful participant he quotes) wondering what it was about Second Life that made this event powerful, and whether it will inspire activism offline as well.
Part IV, to come, should finish the series.
(Image by Leigh Blackall at http://www.flickr.com/photos/leighblackall/64955397/; license details there.)