Second Life is a tremendously enriching experience. The environment is more stable now than one or two years ago and progress is being made for business users and for residents in general. So everytime I log in during the European evening I’m a bit disappointed to see that the number of users inworld seems not to increase very much – it’s somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000.
At least, that is my impression. In the latest statistical release by Linden Lab, it says: “In September 2009, Monthly repeat logins peaked at 750,446. Year to year, September 2009 repeat logins grew 23% from September 2008 repeat logins and are slightly down from the peak of 752K set in May of 2009 before the Bot policy went into effect.”
For now my impression is that Second Life has a very loyal following, but I don’t see any signs of mass-adoption at all (even though there are exciting new projects by universities, the military and companies).
Mitch Wagner, reporting in InformationWeek about Second Life Enterprise, writes that Second Life is attracting a “cult following” among businesses. That reminds me of Howard Rheingold, who speaks about a tiny cult which could grow to a small cyber culture.
There was some controversy about that, especially on the New World Notes, where Wagner James Au asked his readers to react on my post about Rheingold’s statement. Now Wagner James Au posted about how Second Life can truly become a mass market, and he suggests a deep integration with Facebook.
In my view he identifies a major obstacle for mass market adoption:
Or to put it another way: to gain mass growth, Second Life may have to abandon the expectation that new users adopt a whole separate personality. As YoVille and other top social games (which now count 100 million+ users) suggest, most people prefer avatars that are firmly linked to their first lives.
It seems that for business users, Linden Lab acknowledges this issue and allows for real name identification. Of course, residents can use their real names too, but it takes extra effort, they cannot change the avatar name and most importantly, it’s just not part of the Second Life culture.
The question remains of course, whether it will not be necessary to tweak the Second Life culture in order to appeal to a much broader audience (and especially to young people who want to link to real world identities).
Anyway, I am looking forward to read the second part of the New World Notes’ recommendations…
Roland Legrand