What happened to Second Life?

Fonte: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8367957.stm

Not long ago Second Life was everywhere, with businesses opening branches and bands playing gigs in this virtual world. Today you'd be forgiven for asking if it's still going.

Once upon a time Second Life had a Twitter level of hype. Even those without a cartoon version of themselves couldn't plead ignorance due to blanket coverage in newspapers and magazines.

Second Life is a virtual world started by the US firm Linden Lab in 2003, in which users design an avatar to live their "second life" online.

And everything about this world can be customised for a price - new outfits, drinks in a bar, even a luxury mansion can be bought with Linden dollars.

Mentions of Second Life first crept into the UK media mainstream in early 2006.

The Maldives were the first to open a virtual embassy in 2007

A year later, newspapers fell over themselves to cover it, devoting many column inches in their business, technology and lifestyle sections to profiles and trend pieces. By the end of 2007 Second Life had secured more than 600 mentions in UK newspapers and magazines, according to the media database Lexis Nexis.

IBM bought property in 2006, American Apparel opened a shop the same summer, Reuters installed avatar journalist Adam Pasick - also known as Adam Reuters - to report on virtual happenings, and countries established virtual embassies.

The number of people joining the site jumped from 450,000 to four million in 2007.

But just as quickly as it had flared, media interest ebbed away. References plummeted by 40% in 2008 and dropped further this year. And businesses diverted their resources back to real life.

American Apparel closed its shop just one year after opening. Reuters pulled its correspondent in October 2008. When asked about his virtual experience, Pasick says: "It isn't a subject we like to revisit."

So, what happened?

SECOND LIFE'S PRECURSOR In Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson, a seminal sci-fi work of the 90s, one of the plots is that there was this whole metaverse exactly like Second Life, only cooler. You had a whole generation of people who read Snow Crash and were talking about this idea of the internet as a 3D world you could immerse yourself in Ben Hammersley

Not much, says Wired UK editor-at-large Ben Hammersley, and that was the problem.

"You could go and open these stores and no-one would turn up," he says.

"They would have 20 to 30 people there when it opened, and after that no-one would bother going in there again. It just wasn't worth the spend."

The "spend" varied from business to business. A retailer like American Apparel might spend £10,000 on designers, as well as storage space from Linden Lab, to build a virtual store.

But at the peak of the hype, the cost of purchasing or building property was worth it.

"The first to go online would make the front page of the Guardian," Mr Hammersley says. "But when you're the 15th country who goes on Second Life, no magazine, no newspaper touches it."

Some businesses and users found it wasn't quite for them. The technology wasn't easily grasped and some computers couldn't handle it.

Second Life has had to temper its ambitions for the quality of graphics to extend its accessibility across varying speeds of broadband around the world, leading to complaints about the cartoony look and feel of the site.

And there is a fundamental question about whether Second Life is a game or a social networking site.

"It's not a really good social space," Mr Hammersley says. "Not as good as Facebook or any general online forum.

Avatars can walk, fly and teleport

Simon Gardner, a 23-year-old freelance social media marketer, believed the hype in 2007.

He signed on, created an avatar with a shock of red hair that vaguely resembled him, and jumped into what he found to be a lacklustre experience.

"It was a real pain. You have to learn how to control things and read manuals on how to get to islands and get off. Half the time you're just wandering around talking to weirdos."

After three months Mr Gardner became bored and left.

Mobile dilemma

And the online social network scene is a crowded one. "The key to anything online is to get a broader reach of people," says Jim Clark of market researchers Mintel. The learning curve required for Second Life prevents many general users from returning regularly.

As more people turn to smart phones, sites need a mobile presence to stay relevant.

"Mobile is the future of any activity online. This is something that Second Life will struggle to penetrate," says Mr Clark.

This is because the graphics require more memory than current smart phones can handle.

But Linden Labs isn't worried, because the number of users continues to rise.

"Monthly repeat login - a metric we use to gauge the number of users engaged with Second Life - grew 23% from September 2008 to September 2009," says Mark Kingdon, chief executive of Linden Lab.

In IBM's Virtual Green Data Center, avatars can seek IT advice

On average, a million people log in each month, he says. In October 2009, 75,000 of those were in the UK.

And the site continues to evolve, Mr Kingdon says. It launched a new product earlier this month geared towards businesses, and will soon be launching more user-friendly and intuitive software.

And many companies and organisations are still holding on to their virtual selves - 1,400 of them says Mr Kingdon. IBM continues to be an avid supporter of Second Life.

But for many others, the jury is out.