Making a Metaverse That Matters

CHAPTER 2Second Life and the Mystery of the First Metaverse Platform

It's November 30, 2006, in San Francisco, at the Commonwealth Club of California. It's the largest public affairs forum in the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. has spoken there, as have multiple American presidents and countless luminaries in literature, science, and business.

On this night the topic is “Online Personas: Defining the Self in a Virtual World.” The panelists include the CEO of LinkedIn and Robin Harper, VP at the startup Linden Lab, developer of Second Life.

And, at the cherubic age of 22, the founder of a social network for college kids, something called Facebook.

Tech executives and Bay Area Brahmins are gathered to hear them discuss the future of online identity.

The moderator's first question, along with the panel's general framing, assumes that 3D virtual worlds like Second Life will define the future social experience online—so much so, that the panelists are even asked what kind of avatar they'd like to have in a virtual world. Mark Zuckerberg hesitates at first, then says being an avatar who looks like Cher might be fun.

No one then—not even perhaps Zuckerberg himself—could have foreseen what would transpire over the next 15 years.

It's one of Silicon Valley's greatest mysteries, and it's haunted me for over a decade:

How did Second Life, among the most well-publicized technology platforms of the early 2000s, anointed by countless experts as the coming of The Metaverse itself, fail ...