Second Life and its creators Linden Lab have taken a lot of flack over the last couple of months mainly in response to inflated user numbers and also poorly judged brand activity in the virtual world. The thing is it looks like we’ve all given it a kicking and it’s got back on its feet again and shrugged it all off. More and more mainstream articles are focusing on virtual worlds (see this one in the Telegraph) and we’ve already been asked to participate in three conferences on Second Life in the real world and virtual. The train might have left the station and there’s no way to stop it.
Something to ponder.
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I’d suggest that the reason SL is still growing (so fast now that Linden Lab has just announced a contingency plan to restrict logins to so-called “verified” users to keep their grid from locking up; concurrent use has skyrocketed) is because the catalyst for the recent SL backlash got the media story right but the meaning story wrong. Yes, MSM was screwing up and fueling hype with worthless “resident” numbers, but before those numbers ever became a story, plenty of major media outlets were talking about SL. And for good reason.
Second Life cannot, as Shirky, the author of the article that acted as catalyst, be evaluated with an accountant’s mindset. There is an element of Design going on here of the likes that separates Dell from Apple. People who spend their time using only numbers to evaluate success in an age when everything seems to become a commodity, will inevitably find themselves having to deal with real people… even if they’re represented as avatars in an online virtual world.
February 18th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
As I’ve been discussing the anti-hype elsewhere and some of what’s been said may be of interest, here’s a link:
http://www.howardowens.com/2007/be-skeptical-of-the-hype-around-virtual-worlds
February 19th, 2007 at 3:08 pm