The gist of the piece is that marketers are marching like lemmings off the Second Life cliff, throwing time and money into building virtual communities that no one visits. The reasons range from the technology limitations of Linden Labs’ servers to a kludgy user interface to the excessive time it takes to find and get to anything in Second Life.

One particularly damning statistic: 85% of people who create avatars have abandoned them, the article says.

I was somewhat relieved to read this piece, because I have been feeling disconnected from the whole Second Life phenomenon. While I created a profile and buzzed around the virtual world for a while, I never got much of a sense that I was part of a bigger group. In fact, I can’t think of a single person who’s told me that he or she spends a significant amount of time in Second Life. If Wired is correct, a lot of people have been engaging in self-deception.

A particularly interesting comment is at the top of the third page of this profile. It proposes that one of the reasons for Second Life's popularity is that it looks so much like the physical world. This gives marketers a sense of comfort that they don't have when experimenting with the more effective but less familiar tactics that really do work online. In other words, if we can just recreate familiar surroundings, we’ll be okay.

In reality, I can't think of a successful virtual reality product that isn't a computer game. People have been experimenting with online analogies to physical experiences since the earliest days of the Internet. One of the first ambitious business-to-business projects I can remember, in fact, was a virtual tradeshow that had visitors wandering around an exhibit hall floor and looking at products and collateral. I don't remember who put on the show, but I do remember that the experience was notable for its lack of participants. It was never repeated.

Perhaps virtual worlds to have a future, but this article may go a long way toward ensuring that Second Life doesn't.

Labels: socialnetworks

¶ 3:39 PM