Will the Last One Out of Second Life Please Turn Out the Virtual Lights?

The 3D virtual world Second Life celebrates its fifth anniversary this month, claiming it has over 10 million registered users and has logged up to 50,000 concurrent users at a time. The Eyeball is one of those 10 million registrants, and like many others he just signed up to see how boring it was before logging out forever. Linden Labs (owner of SL) have always played silly games with their numbers, and none of its stats really indicates much of anything anymore. SL is the kind of thing the Eyeball hesitates mocking if only because you never know what lame-brained geeky behavior is going to catch on ultimately. (We’re still wondering if Twitter really matters). As a marketing vehicle, SL surely is a bust. Except for virtual worlds that MTV/VH1 erected around some of its TV shows (“Virtual Hills”) virtual worlds have not proven effective places to extend brands. Cisco and IBM still believe that avatars and 3D workspaces will make great virtual meeting worlds of the future, but we remain skeptical. Except for high level gaming worlds like World of Warcraft, virtual existence shows no signs of breaking out into the mainstream any time soon. We suggest that any partnership meeting that involves prominent use of the term “avatar” end quickly.