Business and Blogging

Second Life and a Pub With No Beer

by Des Walsh on July 26th, 2007

It’s just on a month ago that I posted here about the virtual BlogHer conference on Second Life, paralleling the First Life version of BlogHer 2007 about to commence in Chicago.

Since then I’ve dropped into Second Life (SL) on a few occasions and spent some time looking around. I keep thinking there must be more to it than I’m seeing, but I wonder.

It’s certainly interesting to see the various venues that have been developed and to go through the experience of “speaking by typing”, through my avatar, with other people’s avatars.

Although so far I’ve mainly found areas which when I drop by are populated sparsely or not at all by people via their avatars, for example the gallery and beach sites pictured here where on several visits I have never seen another person/avatar.

One site I tried out today, because I read in a Wired article (see below) that it’s where amounts of the SL currency, Linden dollars, are given away, was certainly well populated, but getting the currency proved too impossible. My screen froze and I just had to quit the whole Second Life site to be able to get my “multimedia” computer going again.

Judging by a leading article just out in Wired, some companies are questioning their investment in Second Life. How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life resonated for me, admittedly on the basis of very limited experience so far:

Then there’s the question of what people do when they get there. Once you put in several hours flailing around learning how to function in Second Life, there isn’t much to do. That may explain why more than 85 percent of the avatars created have been abandoned.

But although the article is pretty scornful about the way some companies are spending huge amounts of money on this experiment, there is some acknowledgement (with a sting in the tail) that we could expect to see more of a corporate presence in such environments.

The Internet will eventually be full of such 3-D environments; Second Life might even be one of them. But in the meantime, it’s just slurping up corporate dollars and delivering little in return.

At Business Blog Summit, Teresa Valdez Klein picks up on the Wired article and asks Is Second Life a Waste of Time and Money for Marketers? Her comment picks up on the challenge for corporations in seeking to build communities online:

The lesson here is pretty straightforward: online community building isn’t about fancy technology or flashy corporate pavilions in 3-D worlds. It’s about enabling people to connect with one another in ways that are meaningful to them.

On Social Media Today, Paul Gillin is prompted by the Wired article to ask Is Second Life a massive marketing self-deception? and observes:

The gist of the piece is that marketers are marching like lemmings off the Second Life cliff, throwing time and money into building virtual communities that no one visits. The reasons range from the technology limitations of Linden Labs’ servers to a kludgy user interface to the excessive time it takes to find and get to anything in Second Life.

I was interested when I found a bar! But it turned out to be the pub with no barperson and perhaps the pub with no beer.

Looks like the best we can say in terms of business on Second Life is that the jury’s out.

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POSTED IN: General, Social Media, Social Networking, Virtual Worlds