i was just reading pranab’s interesting blog entry about “user generated content — how important is it?”, in which he looks at how user generated content is perceived by the corporate dudes & dudettes, and he remarks

Also at the same time, I feel that UGC is very important, and unlike what some people consider that UGC is secondary, my conclusion is that is perhaps the most important factor for VWs. VWs like Second life gives tools to its users who can build 3D models without the need for expensive 3d tools like Maya or trying to learn open source 3D tools like Blender.

— and i wholeheartedly agree. in fact, i think it’s one of the reasons that secondlife will become increasingly difficult to beat: it’s got tons and tons of user created content. even if you were willing to cough up the money to recreate content on a similar scale, it would not be the same because of the diversity of the content creators — we thrive on textures (visual textures, but also sound textures, fabric textures, food textures!), content generated following a corporate recipe will always lack that quality of textures we get from an environment that has grown over time (history!) and has been contributed to by many creative people. it’s also one of the reasons that internal, corporate driven virtual worlds and web 2.0 systems never really fare as well as external systems: too little texture, not enough real culture (the term corporate culture is in many cases, and increasingly so, an oxymoron, i think). chatting to the CTO of a larger consulting company recently (as part of my IBM work, i’m not about to change jobs ;-) i learned that their internal facebook look alike system was used by about 800 or so of their employee, but that they found more then 14‘000 of their employee being active on the real facebook…

for me the conclusion is clear: don’t waste time with internal virtual world systems, don’t waste time with internal web 2.0 systems for which there are much better systems on the internet (don’t get me wrong: IBM’s fringe web 2.0 service is excellent and very useful, for example) — instead concentrate and contribute to open up and standardize on a SL based open grid!