SecondLife Doomed?

Reading MySpace, Second Life, and Twitter Are Doomed , there was a lot of 'duh' when it came to MySpace. In many ways, MySpace seems to be the opiate of those who couldn't find any more Microsoft Frontpage - which is not a bad thing, but it is necessarily ugly and has given other technologies a chance to mature into more user friendly ghosts of what they need to be. I'm referring to content management systems.

Plus, everyone got their 15 Megabits of fame from MySpace. Twitter I won't comment on because I haven't used it and have felt no urge to. It is named too much like what I think of a small muscle spasm. I can't take it seriously, and if I did I would go to see a doctor.

SecondLife. Yeah, SecondLife. Here's what Lance Ulanoff had to say:

...Second Life could just as easily be the first to go. No one believes its reported participation numbers anymore, even though big companies, such as Circuit City and IBM, have built virtual stores (and Playboy is jumping in with both, er, feet this month). Some individuals are even claiming to make real-world money in there, but are they really? Frankly, I think Second Life is the equivalent of a virtual con. There's no doubt that it's enjoyed startling growth in the last year and a half, but that was driven, for the most part, by the laudatory press and media coverage it received. Companies herded like sheep to the platform, because they believed the hype. So did users. But reality is finally starting to trump perception. Companies' virtual stores sit empty, and there's no way they can measure if they're building any additional brand recognition simply by being there.

Of course, they're not...

Yes. And no. The main problem with corporate presences is that they are corporate presences. Don't get me wrong, every corporation has groupies - marketing makes them rock stars, if only for an IPO - but there is a subtle difference between groupie and lemming. But is Second Life a future of corporations? If we believe Ulanoff, it would have to be for Second Life to fail. Let's pause for a moment.

Does anyone really want to download a 30.9 megabyte client to go to a place in a virtual world which then points them to a web browser? What's the sense in that? Why not just use the web browser? No, virtual worlds are social spaces that marketers have hyped beyond recognition.

The metrics of Second Life are a boondoggle, but Tateru Nino has advised me that Meta Linden is working on such things. I'm not a big fan of Linden office hours; I've seen too many other things ignored to take Linden Lab seriously in that context. Their blog isn't used in a timely manner, and their communication is either vague or lackluster - with occasional bouts of clarity.

The success of Second Life is not to be measured in corporate presence. Oddly, I wrote about presences of IBM, 1-800-Flowers and Playboy over the last few days - but my other option was to continue posting about problems that will hopefully be remedied on the morrow with the update. the success of Second Life is not a quantitative measure, but a qualitative measure. The success of Second Life is about the average person finding value in it. Everything depends on that.

Where I see the potential for failure is with Linden Lab's adaptations to their own environment which affect the value the average person will find in Second Life. The greatest indicator of this failure is the continued lack of acknowledgment of this problem in a meaningful way...

Let the healing begin...