It launched a new product earlier this month geared towards businesses, and will soon be launching more user-friendly and intuitive software.Īnd many companies and organisations are still holding on to their virtual selves - 1,400 of them says Mr Kingdon. In October 2009, 75,000 of those were in the UK.Īnd the site continues to evolve, Mr Kingdon says. On average, a million people log in each month, he says. In IBM's Virtual Green Data Center, avatars can seek IT advice "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. This is because the graphics require more memory than current smart phones can handle.īut Linden Labs isn't worried, because the number of users continues to rise. This is something that Second Life will struggle to penetrate," says Mr Clark. "Mobile is the future of any activity online. The learning curve required for Second Life prevents many general users from returning regularly.Īs more people turn to smart phones, sites need a mobile presence to stay relevant. "The key to anything online is to get a broader reach of people," says Jim Clark of market researchers Mintel. Half the time you're just wandering around talking to weirdos."Īfter three months Mr Gardner became bored and left.Īnd the online social network scene is a crowded one. You have to learn how to control things and read manuals on how to get to islands and get off. 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. Simon Gardner, a 23-year-old freelance social media marketer, believed the hype in 2007. "Not as good as Facebook or any general online forum. "It's not a really good social space," Mr Hammersley says. 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.Īnd there is a fundamental question about whether Second Life is a game or a social networking site. The technology wasn't easily grasped and some computers couldn't handle it. Some businesses and users found it wasn't quite for them. "But when you're the 15th country who goes on Second Life, no magazine, no newspaper touches it." "The first to go online would make the front page of the Guardian," Mr Hammersley says. A retailer like American Apparel might spend £10,000 on designers, as well as storage space from Linden Lab, to build a virtual store.īut at the peak of the hype, the cost of purchasing or building property was worth it. The "spend" varied from business to business. "They would have 20 to 30 people there when it opened, and after that no-one would bother going in there again. "You could go and open these stores and no-one would turn up," he says. Not much, says Wired UK editor-at-large Ben Hammersley, and that was the problem. When asked about his virtual experience, Pasick says: "It isn't a subject we like to revisit." Reuters pulled its correspondent in October 2008. And businesses diverted their resources back to real life.Īmerican Apparel closed its shop just one year after opening. References plummeted by 40% in 2008 and dropped further this year. The number of people joining the site jumped from 450,000 to four million in 2007.īut just as quickly as it had flared, media interest ebbed away. 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. 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. The Maldives were the first to open a virtual embassy in 2007Ī 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.
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