TechRadar has a fairly balanced article regarding what happened to Second Life and where it’s heading, which you can read here. What I like about this article is that it doesn’t end by saying Second Life is going nowhere, it also has quotes from people like Tateru Nino and current Linden Lab CEO RodVilla Humble.
The article is realistic, there was too much hype, big brands thought they could come in, build something and people would come. I have long maintained that the big brands should have intergrated more, I understand that this is tricky in a user generated content world, they lose some control and maybe didn’t want their brand side by side with a store with a huge phallus on the top of the building (I saw stores like this when I first arrived and they made me cringe). However brands should have been looking to sponsor more gigs, sponsor art galleries, plant adverts in sims, generally engage with the Second Life public.
Then there’s the issue of the learning curve and whereas more experienced Second Life users find it hard to understand that the learning curve is steep, it simply is for many people. I joined Eve-Online earlier in the year for a while, they have superb tutorials, they email you with more tips when you’re new, Eve-Online has a steep learning curve too but they do try harder to keep new users engaged with those tutorials but in a user generated world where Linden Lab have less control than the creators of a world like Eve-Online, it’s harder to guide people.
We still have the viewer wars going on, some people simply can’t get to grips with viewer 2 or 3, there have been great improvements in the later generation of viewers, but some people are still traumatised by their first experiences and for others, they simply don’t like it, this is one area where TPV’s are a real benefit to the community.
Then there’s the issue that some people don’t like open ended find your own way worlds, they like to be guided. We had an interesting discussion about this on my roleplaying sim the other day where some of the mods were saying we needed to guide people to the roleplay, otherwise they stand around and get bored, then they don’t come back, this is challenging, although rumours that we may at some point get decent NPC’s may help here, but that’s still a rumour.
However the advantage Second Life has in the pseudonym stakes is pointed out in that article and that is an important point, Rod Humble (The CEO!!!) points out that Second Life can be a safe environment for people to express themselves and this is extremely important in an age where The Facebook juggernaut is riding roughshod over social norms,Spotify forcing new users to register with a Facebook account being the latest car crash in that area, I’m really disappointed with Spotify CEO Daniel Ek over this cave in.
Where the future of Second Life lies none of us really know, but the concept of a world based around user generated content, a world where people can express themselves freely, a world where people can create their own world, remains an absolutely brilliant concept.