Terri stumbled across something interesting in Second Life the other night – a HippiePay ATM.  Clicking on one of these things connects you to their website where you can fill out “surveys” to earn money in Second Life.

They aren’t really my idea of surveys though…  Rather than a series of questions to determine your opinion on various subjects and events, it’s more of an attempt to spam you with junk you don’t want.  Every “survey” is a list of free offers to sign up, with payment requiring that you fill out some number of them.  All of them want an email address, most of them also want a phone number and mailing address.  All of them look very questionable, so I was happy to be using FireFox to browse the site instead of Internet Explorer.  And about half of the “surveys” are broken to some degree – after clicking and filling out information through several screens it’ll suddenly dead-end with no way to move forward, and no payout either.

Still, HippiePay does what it claims to – it earns you money relatively quickly.  I’ve spent about an hour clicking through surveys and I’ve got $L 600 now – which would have taken me days or even weeks to earn camping.  I really don’t know how ranks in Second Life’s economy…  I doubt if it’s a terribly impressive sum…  But it is enough for me to purchase some items, and I’m no longer in debt for partnering with my wife, so I’m happy.

Ultimately, of course, the goal is to find some way to become more self-sustainable.  Rent some space from someone and set up shop – sell items that people want or open some kind of club with a cover charge.  I have created a couple shirts and a jacket for myself and am very eager to try creating more complex things, but I am beginning to suspect that the idea of Second Life as a more or less self-sustaining economy is falling apart.  I think it would be very hard to keep up with the rent on virtually any chunk of land in there.

Second Life just doesn’t seem lively enough.  Most of the locations I visit are empty.  Nice looking landscapes, interesting buildings, plenty of stuff for sale – but nobody around.  It’s rare to see more than a couple people in any one place at a time, and usually it’s someplace that’ll earn them money – like the HippiePay ATMs or various campgrounds.  I have yet to find a club or mall that is actually busy.   About the only places I’ve seen people in any numbers, besides the campgrounds, are the public sandboxes – areas where anybody can build anything, regardless of whether they own property or not.

It seems to me that most of the people who are hanging around in Second Life are of the “creator” type…  Creative and technically skilled enough to turn out their own clothes/cars/buildings/whatever.  Sure, not all of them are going to be able to roll out massively scripted interactive goodness…  But most of them are able to turn out some basic clothing and accessories.  And that’s fine, but there don’t seem to be a whole lot of “consumer” types – people willing to simply spend money on their clothing and accessories.  Everyone is trying to sell their stuff, but it just doesn’t seem like that many people are buying.

Still, it’s an interesting place, and I’m having fun exploring it for now.

I’ve been holding out for literally years…  It always sounded vaguely interesting – like the kind of cyberspace Internet we see in movies like Johnny Mnemonic made real…  But it also looked like a terrific place to run into exactly the kind of annoyingly social people that I can’t stand.

But eventually my curiosity won out, and I’ve created a Second Life account.

I’ve only been messing around in Second Life for a day or two and I’m still completely lost.  It is certainly interesting to see what people have created – both avatars and landscapes vary from amazing to unimpressive.  Navigation is difficult.  I’m accustomed to my FPS keyboard config, and I’ve yet to find any way to reconfigure Second Life’s controls.  It also gets very laggy in heavily populated areas.  It also seems that much of Second Life revolves around spending money, which can be hard to come by if you have a free account.  I’ve been “camping” a lot lately…  People pay you to simply stand around and make a place look more popular.

What really interest me is the ability to build and customize the world.  Object creation is pretty straightforward, and the scripting language doesn’t look terribly difficult to pick up.  I’m looking forward to seeing just what I can come up with.