Maybe, if we’re to believe a report by tech blog Valleywag which interrogates the information provided by Linden Lab, the company behind SecondLife. Valleywag suggests that all they hype about the virtual world sounds a lot like dotcom bubble 1.0. Central to their criticism is the idea of ‘recently logged in’:
If we think of a user as someone who has returned to a site after trying it once, I doubt that the number of simultaneous Second Life users breaks 10,000 regularly. If we raise the bar to people who come back for a second month, I wonder if the site breaks 10,000 simultaneous return visitors outside highly promoted events…
There’s nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived.
Maybe it’s time for all you brands to build little islands with funky animations off the edge of PSFK’s mainland instead?? ;)
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It’s certainly a good point. I wonder how representative my experiences are. I’m a mid-age professional at a large IT company, with a job that allows me to go create new apps to take advantage of trends that smack of the next big thing. I’ve become interested in secondlife for reasons I can’t fully explain. Maybe I’m caught up in a bubble and have lost my footing as well. But I have spent a fair amount of time trying to dream up what could be done with this latest incarnation of the long-standing goal of the virtual reality community. Has it really reached a critical mass? Or is it following a course best characterized by the clever term “TryMe Virus.” Time will tell, but that doesn’t help folks who are trying to decide what to do with it. I remember buying my first HTML 1.0 book and then noticing within months that the was just everywhere. But what can a 3D website/3D chat room really offer more than the web? Does a spatial layout of information help? Don’t some of us find it natural to organize information by location? I can usually reach for the paper I’m looking for underneath stacks of others on my desk as long as no one has moved it, and I’ve never been able to pull off an effective indexing scheme. But the ramp up to do anything useful in secondlife still seems like its best left to the next generation. Either that or if it does take off, a new service industry will flourish. The early days of the web certainly had lots of do-it-yourself websites that are well below the bar these days.
I’ve started my son on a teen secondlife account. He took to it immediately. I told him how people are making money in second life that is convertable to real $. He’s already passed the TryMe criteria, but it’s a long way from knowing whether he’ll contribute to a rising economy or soak up bandwidth as secondlife fizzles. One thing that is clear, is that the 3D interface is the preffered interace, yahoo is a mail client, and google is about as novel as electricity.
I haven’t been in secondlife more than a handful of times, but my own return user count does not reflect my enthusiasm and interest for this round of bringing VR to the world. I’m actively trying to figure out how I can help, what new apps I could come up with, how to make this round take hold. On the other hand, I haven’t given Linden Labs a dime yet either. I hear 07 is the year they’ll go open source. Good move. Very encouraging. I wish them the best, and I’ll keep trying to find a place to step in and push.
December 14th, 2006 at 2:04 pm