Real Real Estate Execs Look to SL Land Barons
When more than 2,000 real estate agents and executives gather in San Francisco this July for a big real estate and technology conference, one of the people they’ll hear from is David Fleck, Vice President of Marketing at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. Fleck will present on “Virtual Real Estate: What must we learn from gamers, immersive online communities and their addictive, artificial worlds of ‘real’ estate?”, according to this press release.
While the audience would probably be better served hearing from one of SL’s land barons themselves — Fleck will probably give the usual “Isn’t it cool that Anshe Chung earns $100,000 a year in the SL real estate market” talk — it’s nice to see that a real-world industry is beginning to look for lessons in Second Life. There’s no doubt that the technology could be useful in the real-world real estate sector. But things will only get really interesting once you have the actors on one side talking to the actors on the other, rather than to the marketing staff.
Feeds
The press release link goes to a Microsoft page and doesn’t seem to be related to SL and this conference.
And I have to say this articles does give me the uncomfortable idea that the Lab has just been toying with us all and manipulating our addictions to their land auction (to which they’re also addicted for their bottom line BTW) in order to achieve their ultimate purpose of just doing their platform and making it serve whatever largest and most high-paying customers of the RL sort they can find. They don’t even invite any land barons to this conference, as you note, and then they purport to pontificate to the “real people” to whom they’d like to ultimately market their software — for the day (no doubt coming soon) when Google Earth and Second Life stuff will merge enough for SL to be a kind of prototyper for people wanting to sell real estate and have try-before-you-buy stuff on their interactive websites. It’s another example, for me, of how they step on the world in order to advance their platform. It just feels crappy to me.
Thanks, Prok! Link fixed.