What happened to Second life? By Even Aas-Eng

I don't think I opened a single adage newsletter in 2006 that didn't have a second life related article. Reuters, IBM, advertising agencies and embassies all set up shop there and the enormous media hype led to a hike in second life members from 1 million in October to 3 million in January 2007. After new year it hasn't been that much fuzz.

For those of you that don't know Second life you can read up here at Wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_life

So they have a lot of registered users but the fact is that only 25.000 people are logged in at once during peak hours. In other words, a fraction compared to other online based video games. Don't get me wrong, I think Second life is a very interesting phenomenon but its not taking over the world quite yet. And how many the active members take advantage of the Reuters in-game news service? Or how many clients have the Norwegian arm of Media.com won with their second life presence? Probably not that many.

One of the best articles on Second life that I saw last year was written by a columnist that had visited all real world companies virtual shops. The picture below is from W hotels virtual aloft suites concept.

As you can see the bar is not exactly crowded! The situation was the same with all the other companies. We can probably conclude that most second life ventures have been created for PR purposes and that if you want to succeed in the world of WEB2.0 you better do business on the users premises.

Personally I hope that the hype has calmed down for good and that Second Life can continue to develop its very interesting social networking/business concept. It will be very interested to see what 2007 brings. For all other companies pregnant with a Second life baby, don't do it if its just for PR, the hype is over anyway.

Even Aas-Eng