The rise and fall and rise again of Second Life

PBS (The American public broadcaster) has a must-read piece on its media shift blog for anyone interested in the virtual world Second Life.

Journalist Mark Glaser charts the history of Second Life over the past eighteen months, showing it up as a classic case of media bandwagoning. Kicking off in May 2006 with a Business Week feature, Second Life turned into a marketing stampede, with companies falling over themselves to set up a presence. In a lot of cases this seems to have been done for no other reason than to generate press column inches about being the 'first' company in a sector to set up shop in a virtual world.

A lot of the hype was just that - with journalists who had in many cases not spent a lot of time in Second Life writing about a latest web 2.0 trend. Though the numbers were going up they were still relatively small, totalling just over a million residents (worldwide) by the end of 2006.

And the way some brands went about it left a lot to be desired. In particiular, some companies repeated mistakes from the first dot.com boom and treated Second Life as another form of advertising Or worse, they tried to sell virtual goods in competition with Second Life residents who were already well established. For one recent example of a brand that's got it badly wrong, see this post from New World Notes about the Armani shop in Second Life.

Cue, a year on, the resulting backlash with coverage in Forbes and Wired questioning the value of Second Life for real world companies. Just like with the hype phase, a lot of what was being said was in some cases inaccurate but still being parroted second and third hand by other journalists.

One example is when the Yankee Group claimed the average time spent in Second Life was ten minutes per user, per month. A figure clearly wrong - Nielsen net ratings here in the UK shows that SL actually has the highest levels of stickiness of any social network. And one which the Yankee Group retracted, but not before it had been quoted as gospel by a number of publications.

The picture seems to have shifted again and is now focused on some of the more serious sides of Second Life. For example, American media giant CBS ran a report on the way people with disabilities interact in the world. Businesses such as Cisco and IBM are using it as company meeting and training ground and partially have it as a replacement to the video conference facility.

Meanwhile Universities are increasingly setting up shop there, seeing Second Life as a much richer form of distance learning than has previously been possible.

As Media Shift concludes, having got through the boom to bust phase, the focus will now hopefully be on Second Life and other virtual worlds as a social phenomenon rather than a marketing fad.

One thing's almost certain. With Mindark, the creator of the virtual worlds Entropia and the gargantuan Chinese world dotman, going for a public listing, World of Warcraft appearing in the first virtual worlds TV ad campaign, and The Gartner Group predicting that 80% of us will have a virtual presence by 2011, these worlds won't be going away in a hurry.