| Reports of Second Life's Demise Greatly Exaggerated |
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| News - Virtual World News | |||
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Once upon a time, there was a virtual world, and in 2007 it became a media phenom. Retail stores and businesses and even embassies jumped on board. Reuters embedded a virtual reporter. Second Life was earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting, revolutionary. And today? Cue the crickets. This is the tale reporter Lauren Hansen weaves in the BBC News Magazine this weekend in her feature "What Happened to Second Life?" In her narrative, it is the story of a overhyped, clunky, unfocused technology that is, by the by, totally uncool. Nothing Hansen says is factually incorrect. She even does the bare minimum to appear objective by interviewing Linden Lab's Mark Kingdon. But her facts are so heavily slanted towards her bias, her focus is so narrow, that she has robbed her readers of the information they need to make their own conclusions about Second Life. Let's look at her evidence, and see if we can remedy that. EXHIBIT A: MEDIA MADNESS Hansen cites reduced media coverage as sign that Second Life has become passe. Using the Lexis-Nexis database, she finds that there were over 600 references to Second Life in UK newspapers in 2007. This figure dropped 40% in 2008, and slid further in 2009. Strong evidence -- if you accept Lexis-Nexis as the best metric for technology or social media coverage and if you take coverage in UK papers as representing the whole of the world. A quick search of Google News, for example, shows that there were 336 stories in English-language publications in the last 30 days alone. This figure may be somewhat inflated by coverage of the launch of Enterprise, but with 4,810 stories archived by Google in the last 18 months, we can say with some confidence that we're looking at about 270 Second Life stories per month. And don't forget the blogs. A blog search yields 7,777 posts containing the keywords "Second Life" and "Linden" in the last month. Let's be fair and say that about only about a quarter include unique news or commentary. That's about 1,250 posts in a single month. That is a lot of electronic and real-life ink for an allegedly faltering technology. It isn't that nobody is talking about Second Life anymore. The mainstream media, constantly on the hunt for something new, simply moved on to the next new thing. We're seeing the same cycle today with Facebook and Twitter. Coverage of Second Life has moved down to the smaller-circulation newspapers who missed the 2007 wave of coverage and more specialized computer industry publications. Its these two groups that are chronicling the growth of the virtual world, and they are collectively doing an excellent job of it. In the last month, B2PBetaTech, BetaBusinessPark.com's Twitter feed, has tweeted links to stories about NASA's call for "virtual lunar geologists" in their Moon sim; about recession-hit nonprofits turing to Second Life and other virtual communities to hold meetings and even formal galas; about an artificial intelligence called Ultra Hal now abroad within Second Life; about an ESL teacher's experience in using Second Life as a way to teach English conversational skills; about legal issues surrounding virtual property when a real-life person dies; about a Second Life sim designed to help war amputees; about Chinese artist Cao Fei's use of Second Life as a virtual gallery space; and about Penn State's requirement that distance-learning advisers have weekly inworld office hours for their students. This represents just a fraction of the media coverage of inworld events and innovations. So if "Adam Reuters," the embedded journalist who pulled out last year, couldn't find stories to cover, one has to ask: how hard was he looking? EXHIBIT B: RETAIL FLIGHT Like Adam Reuters, a number of businesses opened their virtual doors in 2007 to great fanfare, and then quietly slinked away. Hansen interprets this as a failure of Second Life to live up to its promise. But as Beta Technologies CTO Gwyneth Llewelyn explained at the B2P "Leadership In Business" Conference last month, it has taken time for real-world businesses to learn how to adapt to the virtual marketplace. Selling real-world goods from a virtual portal has not been particularly successful, primarily because users prefer to buy items for their inworld life while inworld. Retailers may never have a strong presence in Second Life, but that doesn't really matter as long as the site's internal e-commerce continues to flourish. Linden Labs recently announced that $150 million changed hands in the third quarter of 2009, and user-to-user transactions were up 54% year-over-year. By focusing on retail, Hansen overlooks other ways Second Life can be used by business. IBM has made virtual replicas of some of their more conceptual products to help their sales staff better communicate with potential buyers. Cosmetics giant L'Oreal has conducted market research on new color palates. And even without innovation -- just by setting up virtual workspaces and conferences -- businesses can save many thousands of dollars in accumulated travel expenses each year. In his interview with Hansen, Mark Kingdon pointed out that about 1,400 businesses, universities, and nonprofits have a presence in Second Life today, and that number is expected to grow with the release of Second Life Enterprise. EXHIBIT C: CUE THE WEIRDOS Finally, Hansen hones in on all the well-known problems with Second Life: the restrictions imposed by individual operating systems, graphics programs and bandwidth; the less-than-photorealistic avatars and builds; and the learning curve needed to move about the world with ease. Her money quote comes from a 23-year old social media marketer who used Second Life for three months in 2007. "It was a real pain," Simon Gardner tells her. "You have to learn how to control things and read manuals on how to get to islands and get off. Half the time you're just wandering around talking to weirdos." Old-timers would point out that the community is much different than it was in 2007. Not to say there are no weirdos, because there are weirdos in every online community, no matter what the format. But there is a better support system for newcomers -- as the friendly folks at Beta Business Park will be happy to demonstrate -- and any user should be able to learn the basics in a couple of hours. And no, the virtual world is never going to be everyone's cup of tea. As Linden Labs discovered in South Korea, sometimes whole markets fail to mesh. They recently suspended their local operations and Korean-language support site, with no immediate plans to aggressively grow the market. Industry insiders told The Korean Herald that "Korean users tend to prefer more closed environments where they can interact with people they already know or relatively small groups of people, and are used to fast-paced online games." Peter Gray, a spokesperson at Linden Labs, tells BetaBusinessPark.com some 3,000 Korean residents logged into Second Life in October and spent a total of 70,000 hours inworld. This represents a minuscule part of Second Life's global market, and a minuscule part of the potential Korean market of over 22 million social network users. Linden Labs maintains that the overall metrics look good. Residents spent 118 million hours inworld in Q3 of 2009, with a median 51,000 residents online at any given time. Monthly repeat logins grew 23% between September 2008 and today. CONCLUSION Obituaries for Second Life are premature. It is evolving. It is maturing. It is growing. It is very much among the living. And on that, Ms. Hansen, the jury is most definitely in.
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