3pointD.com

The Second Life Community Convention, the second annual gathering of residents of the virtual world of Second Life, kicked off on Saturday with a fascinating speech by Mitch Kapor, creator of Lotus spreadsheet application (often credited with helping make PCs ubiquitous), founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and chairman of the Mozilla Foundation. Kapor also serves as chairman of the board of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, and gave an engaging account of the process of getting SL off the ground, and his vision for where it might be headed in the future. His talk interweaved parts of his own story as a technology entrepreneur with the trajectory of Second Life, and speculated about “some of the larger meaning of it all and where we might be going.”

Kapor gave great insights into Second Life’s early history, and a nice vision of what the future might hold. 3pointD took as many notes as we could, which we’ll present here essentially unalloyed. The upshot, however, was this: to Mitch, Second Life is a disruptive technology on the level of the personal computer or the Internet. “Everything we can imagine and things that we can’t imagine from the real world will have their in-world counterparts, and it’s a wonderful thing because there are many fewer constraints in Second Life than in real life, and it is, potentially at least, extraordinarily empowering.”

“You are the pioneers and the founders of this new world, and you have unbelievably great opportunities to put your stamp, to leave a legacy, to create things which will endure and have value. The opportunity to participate in the creation of a new world is really a rare one and so I hope you cherish it.” (more…)