Second Look @ Second Life

Recently I noticed that the number of people subscribed to Second Life had grown enormously in the last 5 months and I thought it was time that I had another look.



As it happends, it is not all that it seems....and thus why I thought that it would be good to write this up for anyone that is looking to use Second Life as an eCommerce distribution channel for the Travel industry.



Published Figures:





Our Travel.co.uk Second Life presence does not at the moment drive traffic to the main website Travel.co.uk and the major brands that have have invested in Second Life such as STA Travel, IBM, Microsoft, Playboy, The Weather Channel, Nisson are only clocking up 10,000 weekly visits between them all - see Tateru's Mixed Reality Headcount for more details.



This is supported in articles that I have read in .Net (Sep Issue) titled "Lonely Planet" and Wired (Aug Issue) "Second Life - don't believe the hype".



Frank Rose from Wired based on published figures in June said, "According to Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, the numbers of avatars created by distinct individuals was closer to 4million. Of those 1 million had logged on in the last 30 days, and barely a third of that total had bothered to drop by in the previous week."



If I have got my figures right, in July 2007 there was 12.5m Linden$ = 46K US$ traded/spent in Second Life. (Linden $ is the local currency in Second Life and the exchange rate is 266L$ to 1 US$). Since 2006 there have been $7m US dollars worth of transactions. These numbers are not huge, compared with the millions that are spent online every day online.


IBM still seems upbeat with a press release on the 23rd August 2007 stating that they are going to invest more; "IBM sales representatives in Singapore, Malaysia and Australia will from Thursday staff the company's virtual Business Center in Second Life".




There are now other online virtual worlds emerging such as Entropia Universe which I have tried, however still much in its infancy, with the download size and clunky software probably will stay in it's infancy.


Second Life accounced at the beginning of the year that is going to make it's technology open source with continued commitment to building the Second Life Grid as an open, extensible platform for development, rather than a closed proprietary system. This I guess is trying to follow the Facebook trend of allowing developers to create many applications that can be used with Facebook and thus embedding itself into ever user.


All in all, I think that Second Life is a very interesting medium, it has some really interactive 3D meeting/communication methods which I'm sure will used/copied by some of the 2D social market applications such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn. I think that time will tell, but I have a feeling that probably Second Life will in time become Second Best.