The first websites that understood that the new bright idea was to offer free services to people in order to let them create communities (and to earn money with marketing2.0 ads etc..) now are rich and happy corporates like youtube, facebook and myspace: all of them offered a user-friendly interface and hosting space on their servers to interact with other people, or better to create a social side of the web.

From that discovery to nowadays everyone else tried to emulate the social network phenomenon working for free on websites and ideas that might have led to the new social network referent ;

Let’s focus on a case : SecondLife and virtual worlds communities

In SL, recently, we had the same phenomenon, in fact a lot of corporates and investors entered in the virtual world offering a large amount of free services over thousands of SIMS; so we have both real pleaces reproductions and both fantastic seasides and beaches.

But the aim remain the same : attract people to your land and let them create a community; The problem is that the population of Second Life is not so high to fill all these places and so the 90% of Secondlife SIMS are empty.

We are watching a mere free services devaluation, in which every land owner is running up to create a community around its land, thinking about all the money he could do with ads; and from the other side there is the SL population rejecting the corporate’s lucrative presence in their virtual world; that’s the reason why so much medias said SecondLife is a deserted place with a lot of advertise and no population.

So the real question is “What’s next?” what will come after the free services era, i mean in secondlife and generally in the web.

Now that we are so full of free web services that they fall in devaluation, maybe its the time to change our strategy.. whats the new bright idea?