SECOND LIFE: A story too good to check

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12.12.2006

A story too good to check

Nbcsecondlifefrogband-1 CLAY SHIRKY -- Second Life, the much-hyped virtual world backed by Benchmark Capital, is heading towards two million users. Except it isn't, really. We all know how this game works, and has since the earliest days of the web:

Member of the Business Press: "How many users do you have?"
CEO of Startup: (covers phone) "Hey guys, how many rows in the 'users' table?"
[Sound F/X: Typing]
Offstage Sysadmin: "One million nine hundred and one thousand one hundred and seventy-three."
CEO: (Into phone) "We have one point nine million users."

Someone who tries a social service once and bails isn't really a user any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer.

So here's my question -- how many return users are there? We know from the startup screen that the advertised churn of Second Life is over 60% (as I write this, it's 690,800 recent users to 1,901,173 signups, or 63%.) That's not stellar but it's not terrible either. However, their definition of "recently logged in" includes everyone in the last 60 days, even though the industry standard for reporting unique users is 30 days, so we don't actually know what the apples to apples churn rate is.

At a guess, Second Life churn measured in the ordinary way is in excess of 85%, with a surge of new users being driven in by the amount of press the service is getting. The wider the Recently Logged In reporting window is, the bigger the bulge of recently-arrived-but-never-to-return users that gets counted in the overall numbers.

I suspect Second Life is largely a "Try Me" virus, where reports of a strange and wonderful new thing draw the masses to log in and try it, but whose ability to retain anything but a fraction of those users is limited. The pattern of a Try Me virus is a rapid spread of first time users, most of whom drop out quickly, with most of the dropouts becoming immune to later use. Pointcast was a Try Me virus, as was LambdaMOO, the experiment that Second Life most closely resembles.

I have been watching the press reaction to Second Life with increasing confusion. Breathless reports of an Immanent Shift in the Way We Live® do not seem to be accompanied by much skepticism. I may have been made immune to the current mania by ODing on an earlier belief in virtual worlds:

Similar to the way previous media dissolved social boundaries related to time and space, the latest computer-mediated communications media seem to dissolve boundaries of identity as well. [...] I know a respectable computer scientist who spends hours as an imaginary ensign aboard a virtual starship full of other real people around the world who pretend they are characters in a Star Trek adventure. I have three or four personae myself, in different virtual communities around the Net. I know a person who spends hours of his day as a fantasy character who resembles "a cross between Thorin Oakenshield and the Little Prince," and is an architect and educator and bit of a magician aboard an imaginary space colony: By day, David is an energy economist in Boulder, Colorado, father of three; at night, he's Spark of Cyberion City--a place where I'm known only as Pollenator.

This wasn't written about Second Life or any other 3D space, it was Howard Rheingold writing about MUDs in 1993. This was a sentiment I believed and publicly echoed at the time. Per Howard, "MUDs are living laboratories for studying the first-level impacts of virtual communities." Except, of course, they weren't. If, in 1993, you'd studied mailing lists, or usenet, or irc, you'd have a better grasp of online community today than if you'd spent a lot of time in LambdaMOO or Cyberion City. Ou sont les TinyMUCKs d'antan?

You can find similar articles touting 3D spaces shortly after the MUD frenzy. Ready for a blast from the past? "August 1996 may well go down in the annals of the Internet as the turning point when the Web was released from the 2D flatland of HTML pages." Oops.

So what accounts for the current press interest in Second Life? I have a few ideas, though none is concrete enough to call an answer yet.

First, the tech beat is an intake valve for the young. Most reporters don't remember that anyone has ever wrongly predicted a bright future for immersive worlds or flythrough 3D spaces in the past, so they have no skepticism triggered by the historical failure of things like LambdaMOO or VRML. Instead, they hear of a marvelous thing -- A virtual world! Where you have an avatar that travels around! And talks to other avatars! -- which they then see with their very own eyes. How cool is that? You'd have to be a pretty crotchety old skeptic not to want to believe. I bet few of those reporters ever go back, but I'm sure they're sure that other people do (something we know to be false, to a first approximation, from the aforementioned churn.) Second Life is a story that's too good to check.

Second, virtual reality is conceptually simple. Unlike ordinary network communications tools, which require a degree of subtlety in thinking about them -- as danah notes, there is no perfect metaphor for a weblog, or indeed most social software -- Second Life's metaphor is simplicity itself: you are a person, in a space. It's like real life. (Only, you know, more second.) As Philip Rosedale explained it to Business Week "[I]nstead of using your mouse to move an arrow or cursor, you could walk your avatar up to an Amazon.com (AMZN) shop, browse the shelves, buy books, and chat with any of the thousands of other people visiting the site at any given time about your favorite author over a virtual cuppa joe."

Never mind that the cursor is a terrific way to navigate information; never mind that Amazon works precisely because it dispenses with rather than embraces the cyberspace metaphor; never mind that all the "Now you can shop in 3D efforts" like the San Francisco Yellow Pages tanked because 3D is a crappy way to search. The invitation here is to reason about Second Life by analogy, which is simpler than reasoning about it from experience. (Indeed, most of the reporters writing about Second Life seem to have approached it as tourists getting stories about it from natives.)

Third, the press has a congenital weakness for the Content Is King story. Second Life has made it acceptable to root for the DRM provider, because of their enlightened user agreements concerning ownership. This obscures the fact that an enlightened attempt to make digital objects behave like real world objects suffers from exactly the same problems as an unenlightened attempt, a la the RIAA and MPAA. All the good intentions in the world won't confer atomicity on binary data. Second Life is pushing against the ability to create zero-cost perfect copies, whereas Copybot relied on that most salient of digital capabilities, which is how Copybot was able to cause so much agida with so little effort -- it was working with the actual, as opposed to metaphorical, substrate of Second Life.

Finally, the current mania is largely push-driven. Many of the articles concern "The first person/group/organization in Second Life to do X", where X is something like have a meeting or open a store -- it's the kind of stuff you could read off a press release. Unlike Warcraft, where the story is user adoption, here most of the stories are about provider adoption, as with the Reuters office or the IBM meeting or the resident creative agencies. These are things that can be created unilaterally and top-down, catnip to the press, who are generally in the business of covering the world's deciders.

The question about American Apparel, say, is not "Did they spend money to set up stores in Second Life?" Of course they did. The question is "Did it pay off?" We don't know. Even the recent Second Life millionaire story involved eliding the difference between actual and potential wealth, a mistake you'd have thought 2001 would have chased from the press forever. In illiquid markets, extrapolating that a hundred of X are worth the last sale price of X times 100 is a fairly serious error.

Like video phones, which have been just one technological revolution away from mass adoption since 1964, virtual reality is so appealingly simple that its persistent failure to be a good idea, as measured by user adoption, has done little to dampen enthusiasm for the coming day of Keanu Reeves interfaces and Snow Crash interactions.

I was talking to Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM about Second Life a few weeks ago, and his interest in the systems/construction aspect of 3D seems promising, in the same way video phones have been used by engineers who train the camera not on their faces but on the artifacts they are talking about. There is something to environments for modeling or constructing visible things in communal fashion, but as with the video phone, they will probably involve shared perceptions of artifacts, rather than perceptions of avatars.

This use, however, is specific to classes of problems that benefit from shared visual awareness, and that class is much smaller that the current excitement about visualization would suggest. More to the point, it is at odds with the "Son of MUD+thePalace" story currently being written about Second Life. If we think of a user as someone who has returned to a site after trying it once, I doubt that the number of simultaneous Second Life users breaks 10,000 regularly. If we raise the bar to people who come back for a second month, I wonder if the site breaks 10,000 simultaneous return visitors outside highly promoted events.

Second Life may be wrought by its more active users into something good, but right now the deck is stacked against it, because the perceptions of great user growth and great value from scarcity are mutually reinforcing but built on sand. Were the press to shift to reporting Recently Logged In as their best approximation of the population, the number of reported users would shrink by an order of magnitude; were they to adopt industry-standard unique users reporting (assuming they could get those numbers), the reported population would probably drop by two orders. If the growth isn't as currently advertised (and it isn't), then the value from scarcity is overstated, and if the value of scarcity is overstated, at least one of the engines of growth will cool down.

There's nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably more skeptical attitude about proclamations that the oft-delayed Virtual Worlds revolution has now arrived.

Comments

Malaclypse says:

I think that eventually the Virtual Worlds hype will deliver but Second Life is still a primordial version of this. Much like how so many internet companies in the late nineties promised they'd revolutionize the way people watch TV, yet this is only really happening now, some eight years later (which of course is eons in Internet Time)

Second Life is a brave prototype, but wait until this whole idea gets a "3.0" type of buzzword attached to it before it's ready for prime time.

SusanWu says:

Second Life is not offspring of the MUD, it's offspring of the MOO/MUSH. World of Warcraft is offspring of the MUD, which is why it is so much more successful. People don't (yet) need a 3D space in which to chat and interact. They have many other far more accessible and far more natural metaphors for this online.

Narnia says:

"3.0 type buzzword" already happened. its been happening since 2.0 made its way from techies and trekies to the mainstream.

lynne says:

Compare this to another popular site mired in controversy for their business decisions - craigslist. In the second life world, the assumption is all one has to do is fake a few million users and you get another myspace and a foolish acquisition. Craigslist, in contrast, is concerned with actually being part of the community in an ongoing way. Some may fault them for going too far in this direction (having too few nonspeculative users), but they have intruded too far into the newspaper's classified ad business to be ignored - to the point that craigslist is starving them on revenue.
So there are two kinds of Internet businesses illustrated - one that is doing a fantasy fade-in for a quick buck, and another that is desparately concerned with real genuine community - at least, as far as classifieds go.
The irony is that these two business types feed off of the same desperate news structure - second life postures itself as the "future" by addicting customers to virtual lives, while craigslist feeds off the newspaper's "past" business of ad revenue.
So who wins? The "future sell" based on addicted eyeballs appeals to the old-guard media conglomerates that cannot or will not compete in their traditional businesses - hence the enthusiasm among journalists and VCs. The "past sell" based on eating the revenue pie appeals to strategic business interests that see an opportunity in owning that market. In the latter case, journalistic spin is irrelevent.
Journalists who play the spin game in the former case may prefer to believe that they are building and defending their own interests. However, it is the craigslists of the world that fundamentally erode their media base. Buying Internet fads like second life may appear to be a panacea for media revenue ills, but at the end of the day it will be no more satisfying than buying a new pair of shoes to assuage a job loss.

franky says:

Check the public Second Life stats for the 30 days returning visits : http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php

And now I need to go snag Buble 30 (:P) just as a mere SEO measure.

Passerby says:

SL has about 15k concurrent users, and its been estimated they have around 70-110 actives.

Thier conversion rate, the rate at which a registered user becomes an active (or rather pays) is debateable, but I would guess its about 5%

adamcole says:

All I know is that whoever is running the Myth Casino is making a ton of virtual cash and I doubt they have to work in real life at the rate they are banking it now. They just started the Virtual World Poker Tour and the entry fee is pretty high. It's like a front for gambling but it sure is fun.

Wagner James Au says:

"If we think of a user as someone who has returned to a site after trying it once, I doubt that the number of simultaneous Second Life users breaks 10,000 regularly. If we raise the bar to people who come back for a second month, I wonder if the site breaks 10,000 simultaneous return visitors outside highly promoted events."

At the moment I type this, Clay, there are 17,041 people in-world, and given the new account creation rate (about 10-14K total through a 24 hour period), only a few thousand of those are likely to be new users. Concurrent users at peak has exceeded 10,000 for over four months, and is now approaching 20K at prime time.

Also, that number has very little to do with "highly promoted events", because most events are architecturally limited to 120-140 people maximum, for one thing-- you can get around that, but it takes some serious planning-- and for another, most SL activity isn't based on around one-time events, it's based around communities and established popular sites.

Your point on churn rate is very well taken, however. One of my writers reported on the scene and has a very good quote from Philip about that:

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/11/new_world_numbe.html

Grand_Egress says:

bless you for your courage and willingness to pinprick the bubble.

the gargantuan amount of capital flowing into tech/new media stratups, married with the painful scarcity of successful exits from same, is fueling a hype machine like never before - absent real rewards VCs and entrepreneurs get desperate and start inventing imagined ones, or at least invent seeming metrics making usccess seemingly around the corner. the fact that the new nirvana is barely wiped down and propped up failed business models of tech bubbles past seems to bother, or capture the attention, of no one

mpesce says:

Let me just say - as the inventor of VRML - amen, brother.

Adam says:

"as I write this, it's 690,800 recent users to 1,901,173 signups, or 63%."

Not quite.

690,800/1,901,173 is .36

That means the rate of return is 36%, not 63%. So, it's actually horrible. You just divided backwards.

Don't feel bad, I totally forgot how to figure out the break out point for a root locus lying on the real axis on my controls exam today... ba!

eraserhead says:

What what what!

You aren't convinced that Second Life is the second coming of the Internet?

Blasphemy!

This is the future son! My god, how can you be so blind! Look, its 3-D, you can fly, you can create stuff and sell it! And by the way, have you seen the size of my virtual cock!

I for one am at my saturation point with Second Life hype.

SL has anywhere from 10-15k people on at a time, so thats what, less than 1% of "Total Users". Even if you say 17k, Mr. Au, your still at 1%. At best only 1% are on at any given time. Gee, I guess the other 99% just don't "get it".

New avatar creation counts towards those totals, so if you create an account, and never log in, your still counted. Also assume most people have more than one avatar. Then factor in accounts created by "land barons" used to purchase First Land. Cancel you account, your still counted.

I would be amazed actually if Second Life had 100k regular users.

As this article pointed out, SL is nothing new, its just a graphics engine strapped onto MUSH/MOO code.

People talk about its educational uses, well this was done with MUSHes and MOOs back in their "day".

People talk about making money in SL, well people are making money off other MMO's, big whoop. If you want to devote your time and effort to making a living off SL, more power to you, but don't get upset when people snicker at you behind your back.

It's SOOOOO refreshing to read articles like this, I mean there is only so much you can polish a turd after all.

costik says:

Well, yes, Second Life gets far more attention and hype than its user numbers deserve; consider WoW. On the other hand, they've made a "non-game virtual world" work, to the degree of having a substantial community of users, which is something I thought was basically impossible. Games are 'interactive entertainment with a goal,' and non-game VWs inherently have no goal; 2nd Life pulled the trick by having adequate tools for user-created content, so there's now enough stuff to explore with its own goals, that it doesn't completely suck. Which is pretty neat, really.

But yes, the idea of the Metaverse is ludicrous; if I wanted to walk through stacks of books, I'd go to Borders. The advantage of the Internet is that it -doesn't- replicate the problems of the phenomenological universe, and the metaphor of a 3D world with avatars is not a good one for most of the things you actually might want to do online.

barrett says:

Hi,

there are several, though simple things I don't get in SL.

Why do people build stairs and delicate escalators, if they can fly?

Why do they spend money (real or virtual) buying chairs if they cannot get tired?

Why do they replicate their rather low quality RL architectural, physical environment _exactly_ in SL when they have the tools to create _anything_ they want?

Why does everyone look like in SL as if they were from the front page of People magazine? Are there any ugly (normal, handicapped, not-so-cute, and/or with disabilities) people there at all?

I guess any of these questions point to some fundamental flaws in the logic of SL. But maybe I am wrong. When VRML was hot I had the chance to advise against investing in a larger VRML based environment, and ever since SL is around i wonder if I had made a mistake back then. In my gut though I feel that I was right, and I am right to be very skeptical now.

IAmEric says:

Hi,

By your own admission,

"I may have been made immune to the current mania by ODing on an earlier belief in virtual worlds:"

I too was burned in the past by believing in this stuff. During the prior crazes, I was a graduate student at UIUC and had access to cool stuff at NCSA, e.g. the "CAVE", and similar things. However, I think your prior disappointments have made you too jaded. I suggest that you really take a second look at this stuff. I believe you will eventually come to an appreciation that "this time it is different". For example, what kind of bandwidth was available in 1993 or even 1996 for that matter? What was the state of graphics processors? Technologically, it is the time for this stuff to take off and we're seeing it happen.

If you haven't seen it, I also suggest you read this:

Mitch Kapor on the Power of Second Life
http://www.3pointd.com/20060820/mitch-kapor-on-the-power-o...

and ask yourself if you are suffering from "macromyopia".

Hamlet gave the link, but here is the direct quote from Philip Rosedale:

"Actually, it is much higher than that," he said. "Although Second Life is still challenging to get used to, about 10% of newly created residents are still logging into Second Life weekly, 3 months later. 10% is pretty good given the computer requirements and steep learning curve"

I also suggest you read Tateru Nino's blog. She has some fascinating and thought provoking articles.

http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/bloggers/tateru-nino

Best regards,
Eric

GlennFleishman says:

Odd that you mention that young people flock to the tech beat and, earlier, PointCast. I'm nearly 40, and have been writing about tech since for over a decade. (I never wrote about games.) I was talking to a terrific young reporter here in Seattle a few weeks ago, and mentioned PointCast. Despite this person being totally au courant and bright, they had never heard of PointCast or even push technology (under that name). It took just a few minutes to brief them, and then they immediately contextualized it. But at a decade younger than me, that whole revolution passed them by.

Your use of immanent confused me. I can see how either imminent or immanent was appropriate. Did you mean transcendence or immediacy?

eraserhead says:

"If you haven't seen it, I also suggest you read this:

Mitch Kapor on the Power of Second Life
http://www.3pointd.com/20060820/mitch-kapor-on-the-power-o...

and ask yourself if you are suffering from "macromyopia"."

I'm suffering from wall-of-text-aphobia. So someone who has a vested interest in SL can blow ALOT of smoke up ours asses.

Didn't read it, didn't need to. I probably speak for the majority of people when I say I don't need someone "explaining" to me the great things about Second Life.

I'm assuming most people who read Valleywag are not new to the internet, and have been around the virtual block before. SL is nothing new, go preach to the people who still log on to LambdaMOO and try and convert them, hell they already believe in that platform, your jobs half done.

cruachan says:

You are of course correct viewings Second Life 's statistics with scepticism, the Total Users statistic at the screen top is as you so rightly observe not really that at all.

However in your haste to call for the emperors clothes I think you miss an essential difference between Second Life and what has gone before, namely the rich support for user-content and in particular the scripting language LSL. These make Second Life a qualitatively different environment from its predecessors.

I'm a professional coder. I returned to Second Life a few months ago after having first tried it in early 2005 - at that time I'd dismissed is as a pretty thin experience not worth my time, and yes I do find it intensely irritating that my former logon is included in their total numbers. However this time around I've stayed, and because the power of the development tools, particularly LSL, has advance to that interesting point where the system can achieve things that the creators never envisaged.

Anyone who's ever developed an application with a significant user development environment behind it will recognise this phenomenon: the jaw-dropping moment at which one of your users comes back and does something with your software that you yourself never realized it could do. This is a very large flag that says pay attention.

Not everyone is a coder of course, but many people like to 'create' in some sense (even if it's just putting together a cool looking avatar). Second Life gives an opportunity for that and then, most importantly, provides a ready-made audience to show off. Sit in any popular gathering place in Second Life land you'll see this happening all the time. As one of my friends observed, Second Life is a vanity-driven culture. It sounds trivial, but to dismiss that would be as much a mistake as dismissing the importance of the fashion industry in real life.

Of course many people will never 'get' Second Life in the same way that many people never 'got' IRC. But I believe Second Life has now evolved to the point where it has sufficiently wide appeal that it is sustainable, even if the percentage of people to whom it appeals at the moment is still limited. What I think most likely to happen, and hope the Lindens can facilitate, is that as more capabilities are added (and more content is created inline) that percentage will grow. There are a lot of caveats in there of course, not least the scalability of the grid which has recently shown signs of strain, but to dismiss Second Life as simply a 'Try Me' virus is to make as big a mistake as the hype in the mainstream press. (Second) Life is more complex than that.

IAmEric says:

I'm not saying SL is new in concept. All of us have been expecting something like this for the past 15 years. Startups have come and gone (I still suggest reading Kapor's speech).

There are two points to my argument: 1.) technology is ready for this now, whereas it wasn't even a few years ago, 2.) the accusations against LL are misdirected.

Regarding the second point, I already posted a quote directly from Rosedale. That was not obtained covertly. If you really want to know what LL is telling the media, it doesn't take a lot of effort to find it. The easy thing to do is to blame them for irresponsible reporting by media that really has no clue about it.

I just hope that bloggers can try to be a little more responsible when reporting material. Especially when there are lots of people involved, it makes sense to do a little homework.

threv says:

"All of us have been expecting something like this for the past 15 years."

In that time, we've grown out of our antiquated space-age concepts of "the future" and realized what the true powers of the internet and information age are.

spending as much time as you possibly can configuring an avatar for activity that is nothing more than an augmented version of getting *off* the computer in the first place is NOT what has made the web such a treasure trove of resources.

in fact, SL violates one of the prime capabilities of the web - interoperability. it's entirely proprietary. why would i spend as much time as i can making something arbitrary for a small subset of people to access? rather - ONLY that small subset of folks can access it, AFTER paying for it, and AFTER going through their own series of hoops to get to what you're offering.

the novelty of SL is what sells it. SL offers *nothing* past that novelty.

cshirky says:

Eric,

I got a pre-launch demo of Second Life, straight from Mitch and the Second Life team, several years ago at PC Forum, so I'm well aware of Mitch's bullishness on the subject. Mitch has done more to advance the state of the world through better technology than I ever will, but neither my admiration nor awe for him is enough to make me suspend my own judgment, and on this subject, I think Mitch is wrong.

More to the point, my contention is not that LL is lying, but that they are happily tolerating unsupportable claims on their behalf made by the press. Note that the core of the piece is reasons why reporters, not LL employees, are treating the story with undue credulity.

Rosedale has been admirably direct in some forums, but quite content to have the "1.x million" figure quoted in others. I'd take LL's bona fides more seriously if they'd pull the Total Accounts number from the login page, and shrink the recently logged in window to 30 days, but these changes, as unlikely as they are, still don't begin to get at the real number, nowhere reported on or derivable from their stats page, which is return users.

As for the in-world experience, and especially the technological support for this sort of thing, you are reading something into the article that is not there. I am not a skeptic of the _technological_ success of SL, but of its social success. WoW long ago proved that the tech scales to many passionate users; the difficulty is in creating many passionate users.

As for pulling my punches because "there are lots of people involved", there are a lot _more_ people on the receiving end of the current hype, and they are the ones I'm concerned with. LL employees can take care of themselves; my audience is the people hearing only that there are millions of people using SL; they haven't been getting their USRDA of skepticism.

IAmEric says:

Hi threv,

I agree with you and here is a good article discussing the issue.

http://callfromnextlife.blogspot.com/2006/11/why-we-need-o...

It is pretty clear to me that SL will become open sourced and with IBM and Sun taking such interest, it is ony a matter of time before SL servers will be available outside LL.

Best regards,
Eric

eraserhead says:

Where these mini Second Life clones devoted full on to Gorean, age play, furry, and goth vampires will rise up and slay the mighty parent at LL, leaving the world safer for all sexual deviants to problem wave their gigantic cocks and vaginas high.

Nick Douglas says:

"Second Life is not offspring of the MUD, it's offspring of the MOO/MUSH."

And it's that kind of pedantry that makes the mainstream users go wild!

eraserhead says:

Technically though, it is, heh.

MOO/MUSH/MUX/TinyMUD grew out of, say it with me, MUD.

Lets go wild!

tparisi says:

A new media type is never properly appreciated when it is first introduced. Edison got it completely wrong with his own invention, the phonograph: he thought its primary use would be for business dictation, not anything as "vulgar" as popular music. Who knew?

The left-brainers can continue to try to analyze Web 3D, and the analysts can try to put it in a box. I suspect that it will defy categorization for some time to come. Meantime, the people who will believe in it will continue to try to make it work. Personally I would bet my money on the second group-- oh wait, in fact, I have. But that's just me, and I'm a Believer.

Why does this topic spark so much polarized discussion? Since I've been in the world of online 3D - about 12 years now - public opinion continues to divide evenly between the skeptical reactionaries and the starry-eyed zealots, with hardly any room in the middle for a realist like me. Clay seems to be in the former camp and I doubt anything is going to shake him of that.

What I fear most about articles like this is that it frames the dialog as a debate over the merits of the medium itself, rather than an examination of what is good and bad about one specific product. I think Clay doesn't care whether SL is good or bad: 3D is useless and this is the smoking gun he's been looking for.

The fact is, as pioneering as SL is, it is hardly ready for mass consumption. It's no surprise to me that only, say, 15% of those registered users do anything with the software on a regular basis. It's a hard product to use and it has a steep learning curve. Too bad Clay couldn't just stick to exploring that issue for its own sake.

pighed says:

yes, eric, alts and returns are hard to count and we're right to be skeptical about the numbers. LL is trying to establish their value - their reputation and attention - and i also disagree with some of the process by which they're using the media.

but there's a perspective not to be overlooked; this is the same process that got the graphical 2d-based internet (aka "WWW") rolling.

AOL did the same thing as SL. in 1993 AOL was distributing a graphical browser and many people had a hard time telling it from mosaic or netscape or whatever. i was an AOL user in 1992 (and i was building web sites in 93) and people got really excited about AOL. and this is what second life is doing, as well.

they're proprietary, what goes in don't come out, they're an isolated island and you need to download a browser to use it. gee, and let me add another parallel which is that their technology is feeble and their methods of governing communities (as well as customer service) is lousy. i could list others. like the hype factor and the number of users.

but this 'proprietary island' model will change in the coming 1-3 years and we will see systems like multiverse, mediamachines, and community-based models crack this open.

anyway, AOL and SL generate interest for a model that eventually replaces them.

my point is this: SL and the media around it indicate that we are moving towards open virtual worlds. we've seen trends emerge, so let's watch history repeat itself. after all, SL is just AOL in 3d.

tparisi says:

Yes, MOO is just another flavor of MUD. Stands for "MUD Object Oriented," so um it's right there in the name.

jwikert says:

Call me naive but my group recently published the first book on Second Life and it's doing phenomenally well right now at all outlets, including Amazon where it's currently ranked higher than Seth Godin's "Small is the New Big" as well as other highly successful titles. I'm not so hung up on the number of members in the virtual community as I am the number of actual copies of this book that get bought. Right now, I can't argue with the success we're seeing in sell-through!

jstogdill says:

Remember when WebVan was going to change the way we buy groceries?

Remember when Amazon was going to change the way we buy everything else?

Both hyped. Who knows...

Three cheers to the idea that reporters should check their stories, and what the heck, maybe even try out the service they are writing about.

But the idea of a company getting all up in their PR firm's grill to tamp down unsupportable claims? Well, that could only happen in an alternative world...

IAmEric says:

Hi Carl,

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Just to clarify, when I said,

"I just hope that bloggers can try to be a little more responsible when reporting material. Especially when there are lots of people involved, it makes sense to do a little homework."

I wasn't talking about pulling punches. There are certainly lots of reasons to throw punches. And the "lots of people" I was referring to are your readers. I just presume that quite a few people read your material and if you're going to throw punches, I simply meant that perhaps you could have done a little more homework. Many people, e.g. Tateru Nino and Philip Rosedale for that matter, have been openly discussing the "try me" phenomenon for quite a while now. I can assure you that not a single SL resident believes there are really 2M people there. I would personally be surprised if there were more than 100K people actively engaged in SL.

A good place to throw punches is at LL executives who know less about SL than the average resident and go around spewing inaccuracies. THAT gets on my nerves :)

Finally, I do believe the time is now for virtual worlds. For the 100K or so actively engaged SL residents, it is here and now.

Did you see the Suzanne Vega thing?
http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2006/08/nwntv_the_secon.html

How about the ZeroG SkyDancers? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3tLwkBNTE4&eurl=

The numbers will continue to grow. Perhaps not at 30-40% per month we're seeing now due to the documented "try me virus", but will likely be at least a steady 5-10% per month of engaged residents. Due to the power of exponentials, that STILL gets to pretty massive numbers pretty quickly. Then again, other efforts are in the works that may end up dwarfing SL. I'm keeping my eyes on Raph :)

Best wishes,
Eric

IAmEric says:

pighed, I love that line, "SL is just AOL in 3d." :)

One could easily write an article walking through the analogies one by one. AOL did manage to bring the web to a large part of the general population just like SL will bring virtual worlds to a large part of the general population. Does that mean we have to trudge through a "Mosaic in 3d", then a "Netscape in 3d" until we have "Firefox in 3d" and "IE in 3d" with various other niche browsers? :)

I don't expect history to repeat itself quite so precisely. The guys at LL are not dummies. They know the history better than we do and are aware of the analogies being made. You can almost smell IBM (and/or Sun) and LL cooking up an open SL server environment. IBM is making significant investments in the technology and they certainly won't want to be running business meetings on LL servers.

CMauro says:

Some numbers gathered from real users

Over the past 9 months our firm has conducted several, formal user experience tests in virtual worlds including SL. Here is some interesting data.

Of those who attempted to complete the entire first user experience (FUE) including account set up, avatar creation and achieving baseline control of a configured avatar, over 70% failed. In formal usability terms the first user experience of some of these systems is among the worst we have seen in 20 years. Yes, some get through the process but MANY do not. Where the numbers come from in the sequence of interaction has a huge impact on understanding the front-to-back user experience and participation levels.

Of the 30% who made it through the FUE less than 10% came back within 30 days. Of those who came back most reported low levels of confidence in their ability to control their avatar and navigate the virtual world. Their confidence and interest level remained at a low level for several hours of in-world engagement.

When we looked at the data behind of those who had reportedly reached deeper levels of immersion in these worlds (time-in-world and repeat visits) over 80% were developers working in-world on projects. (Important note: there is a formal psychological definition of immersion in virtual worlds and less than 2% of the original sample achieved this state over a 3 month period)

All of this aside, some aspects of these virtual worlds do build robust psychological connections with a very small percentage of users. The problem for SL and other new virtual worlds is fundamentally how to move a much larger population of users to higher levels of immersion more efficiently. SL seems to have totally missed this fundamental concept. In the real-world this is known as customer acquisition, retention and migration.

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