The nonesense of SL?

I don't strongly disagree with anything Scott Wilson says about the relative value of properly understanding the social Web vs. Second Life but I'm not totally sure I see it as an either/or situation, which is what seems to be implied by phrases such as:

a serious understanding of social software, feeds, and learning 2.0 technology is harder to achieve than grokking SL, but I think its important to do this before looking into SL

Don't we need to investigate and understand both in parallel? My personal take on it is that our understanding of what, for want of a better term, I'll call Web 2.0 social tools is aided by, rather than hindered by, an understanding of SL.