Is Second Life over-hyped?

When Richard Posner spoke about his latest book recently, he was surprised to see a raccoon in the audience. The location was Joi Ito's island in the virtual world Second Life. (Transcript of the event.)

Events like that make visits to Second Life interesting and rewarding, but after attending a real-world seminar about the virtual world by its creators, Linden Labs, I am not sure if Second Life is the-next-big-thing or hype. (Fortune says it is not hype, Clay Shirky says it is.)

That virtual worlds are hot right now was indicated by the fact that several people had traveled from the continent to attend the seminar in London. But some of the people I spoke to were disappointed with responses to audience questions and the Linden Labs representatives being cagey about user numbers (even when some of the user stats sought are already published).

If virtual worlds have the power to attract other than curious early adopters, if they prove an enabler for social and economic behaviour beyond what the web is already capable of then I suspect the field will evolve to a different constellation. Virtual worlds will be too important to be in the control of a single firm. First we will see established firms enter the market for a period of choice and competition but also incompatibility. Then open source server/clients will become available, access to the virtual world will be built into browsers and devices with everybody contributing computing cycles and redundancy, grid fashion. If 3D interaction is important, it will become a democratised platform on which to build experiences, services and businesses.

Funny that exactly ten years ago I was advising a client about their web presence and I suggested not to go for 3D (even though VRML was hot at the time). Would I advise any different today? Perhaps if the client was in circumstances where they would benefit from the attention or if they could make internal use of the platform. Otherwise wait for better hype/not-hype indicators.

Tags: Second Life Linden Labs VRML hype

Comments

[Clay Shirky]

Though you note that some stats are available, none of those stats contain the one key figure -- return rates.

Linden intentionally obscures this by using the word 'Residents', with all its implications of moving in, to refer to total account setups, which both overcounts users (I have set up more than one free account over the years, at various phases of the site's development) and, more importantly, wildly overcounts users who bail out after one or two uses. Return users are the only metric that matters, and its one we don't now have and can't derive from any other published figures.

[Ben Poole]

Alan Lepofsky is also looking at Second Life, and has a couple of interesting tales to tell about his interaction with others as an IBM-er in a virtual space:

http://www.alanlepofsky.net

[Lars Plougmann]

Thanks for the comments.

I had an interesting experience in Second Life recently when I was asked to participate in an evaluation of bank branch design. The 3D environment allowed the consultants to immerse a group of people in multiple scenarios and get their opinions. Even if the output was only 20% of what could have been gathered by visiting a true mock-up, the cost/benefit of doing it in a 3D environment and not having people travel is compelling.

I would like to get ideas for designing my next house that way. I could see architects and their clients take to Second Life for prototyping.