I gave a presentation about Web 2.0 last December to a PR company in London. For two hours, I told them all about blogs, wikis, social networks and all that good stuff. Polite interest.
At the end, as a bit of fun, I showed them a slide of Second Life. They went wild with excitement.
This was the moment when I started to be sceptical about Second Life. I admit that Second Life is a cool idea but I was amazed by the unquestioning enthusiasm. Me? I prefer to swim upstream.
The PRs hoopla seems to be shared by many respectable journalists, especially in the business press (you know, those guys who thought Enron was a great company). It’s been featured in Business 2.0, Harvard Business Review, Business Week etc.
Now, Shaun Rolph deconstructs the ‘new, new economy’ of Second Life in The phony economics of Second Life in The Register. And, guess what, the emperor is naked. Roplh ask the questions that any self-respecting business journalist should have asked.
Here are some highlights:
- Yes, 3.1m have registered.
- But 85% of registered users never come back after 30 days.
- Rolph estimates the number of regular users at 250,000.
- There are only around 15,000 people logged in at any one time.
- Only one in five users are economically active in Second Life.
- So, perhaps only 3,000 paying, economically active people online at any one time. Hardly the economy of the future.
- The game struggles with more than 100 avatars in one place. So much for concerts.
- More than half of the 21,000 ‘in world business owners’ make less than $10 a month.
- There is no guarantee from Linden about the convertability of Linden Dollars to real world cash. You can’t take it with you.
- Property rights are unenforceable without expensive federal lawsuits.
Rolph hints at the biggest problem but doesn’t fully explore it. Money has to be a store of value as well as a means of exchange if it is to be effective. In the real world, governments can erode the value of stored money with inflation. Economic history is full of countries that bought themselves pain by printing themselves a pay rise.
In Second Life, Linden doesn’t even need a mint to print more money. They can produce more Linden dollars, more land and more objects simply by clicking a button. What is the value of your Second Life space station or exclusive island if anyone can have one and it costs nothing to replicate?
In fact, the only thing that seems to be in short supply in Second Life is participants. It looks like the people have more sense than the business journalists.
Technorati Tags: Second Life, hype, scepticism, The Register, phony, economics
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Out of personal curiosity I’ve dipped into SL, “meeting” and chatting with some interesting people from around the world. It’s not a place for the shy – if you don’t try to interact nothing will happen!
Yes, there are weirdos there. It’s hard to engage with an avatar that is a flickering flame or a stick-insect!
Would I spend more time and (any) money there? Probably not. But as interactions are unscripted you never quite know what might happen next, and this gives it the edge over many computer games.
I’ll take that skepticism and raise you. I think the idea of a virtual world is an interesting one and may become something significant, but if so, Second Life is the pre-alpha version – of interest to hardcore devotees but few others.
I spent a little time poking around in it, not because of great interest but simply because I kept hearing the hype, and found that very little seemed to be happening there – and the investment to participation (in time learning how to work your avatar, find your way around, etc.) was pretty steep. (I kept accidentally flying off cliffs and things, and my avatars clothes kept vanishing or turning black as the software struggled along).
Nice breakdown of the numbers – just the kind of thing that’s nice to have when a client wants to run down a Second Life rabbit hole before covering the “first life” basics of their interactive marketing.
It’s yet another bubble, as is the whole Web 2.0 thing. Surveys show (don’t ask me for the references) that barely 5% of net use is on blogs, web 2.0 sites and other novelties. Basically, the great unwashed masses simply hit google and search for stuff they want to buy or read about, they don’t even notice the shiny reflected logos if they hit a site called Tossr, Wark, Snurk, or whatever.
Another tuppence worth from the genetically enhanced silver tongue.
db
Did anyone else sit through an hour or more of IBM tech heads, masterminded by Irving Wladawsky-Berger, espousing the cause of Second Life? It was so enthralling that the guy who invited me fell asleep.
http://irvingwb.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/transforming_bu.html
All form and no substance. They simply failed to explain what it was for.
I get the impression that the code freaks like its approach to graphics. But so what?
While I do agree with these points to some extent, and have written articles myself about what modern virtual worlds like Second Life are lacking, I think it’s important to consider how young they are.
Only 5 years ago virtual world economies didn’t exist at all. So I think it’s a bit early to decide that they’re hardly the economies of the future. Rather, their current implementation needs heavy improvement.