I don’t particularly like Rosedales ‘anecdote’ for a collaborative model because lets face it, if Second Life was build for 3D collaboration they could have done a lot better, and furthermore, the actual use of Second Life as a digital ‘canvas’ is fairly limited. Its not about creating things together, its about the ability to provide diverse, niche context. Niche enough to become a topic of conversation. You can’t create that top down, its impossible to create content that interests every single niche (and the more niche, the more passionate people are about the topic because it starts to define them). However, when the creation of this content is placed in the hands of the users themselves to express these niche interests they are passionate about, it becomes possible to provide this niche content, effectively filling the ‘long tail’ of social context.

So the free content creation, even by a small percentage of total users, provides the platform with the ’social object’ for others to use - like clips on youTube and pictures on flickr. It’s the topic of conversation - the icebreaker to approach a stranger and just start talking about a shared interest. Lively and other chatrelated worlds lack this incentive because largely they are still being developed by a small group of developers. They develop for the masses - missing out on the long tail of social context that feeds 99% of social interactions on social networks.

PS - Lively is about to provide these tools, though the advantage of Second Life is it provides these tools inside the application itself, as part of the package, stimulating the creation and thereby social interaction tremendously.

Note: I removed some naughty words, because I have very delicate sensibilities - Jonas