It is a Virtual World In Fact
It is a Virtual World In Fact
Concerning popularity, I predict that Second Life will remain a niche application, which is to say an application that will be of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try it. Such niches can be profitable which is an argument I made in the Meganiche article, but they will not, by definition, appeal to a broad cross-section of users.
The logic behind this belief is simple: most people who try Second Life to buy lindens do not like it. Something like five out of six new users abandon it before a month is up. The three month abandonment figure seems to be closer to nine out of ten. This figure is less firming, as it has only been reported colloquially, with no absolute numbers behind it. More importantly, the current active population is still an unknown. Call this metric something like that how many users and second life linden in the last 30 days have accounts more than 30 days old. We know the highest that figure could be is in the low hundreds of thousands, but no one other than the Lindens and presumably, the bigger marketing clients knows how much cheap linden lower it is than this theoretical maximum.
The poor adoption rate is a form of aggregate judgment. Anything bruited for wide adoption would have trouble with 85%+ abandonment, whether software or toothpaste. One possible explanation for this considerable user defection might be a technological gap. I do not doubt that improvements to the client and server would decrease linden dollars and the abandonment rate. I do doubt the improvement would be anything other than incremental, given 5 years and tens of millions in effort already.
Note too that abandonment is not a problem that all visually traversable spaces suffer from. Both Doom and Cyworld server as counter example, in those cases, the rendering is cartoonish, yet both platforms achieved huge popularity in a short period. If the non visual experience is good, the rendering does not need to be, but the converse does not seem to be true, on present evidence.
There have been two broad responses to skepticism occasioned by the Linden population numbers. The first response is not specific to Second Life. Many people have recalled earlier instances of misguided skepticism about new technologies, but the logical end case of that thought is that secondlife money about technology is never appropriate. The second objection is a conviction that demographics are irrelevant, and that the interesting going on in Second Life are what matters, no matter how few users are engaged in those activities.
