At a time when BK Linden is telling us that new user registrations are up, thanks partially due to the new user experience and that Q1 2011 was the most successful in Linden Lab’s history, Vogue Italia are running a story sounding the death knell for Second Life. This story is all the more bizarre because stories about Second Life being empty and people having nothing to do went out of fashion in 2009.
However, we are treading somewhat into there being no such thing as bad publicity, and brands like Ava Choo get a mention, albeit with a complaint that there was nobody in the store to sell them anything, although I do have sympathy with them over the Kenny G music.
The thing with stories like this is that I’ve heard them all before and Second Life has always had empty places since I signed up in 2007, as someone told the person writing the article, you need to know where to look. I used to go to a place called Club Crobar when I was a lad in Second Life, it no longer exists, but other places do. Places come and go all the time.
The thing with RL brands in Second Life has been that they never seemed to use the platform creatively, with a few exceptions. Adobe sometimes throw a party and engage with those pesky residents, but the fashion houses, the people who might have been able to tap into some Second Life advertising inworld, seemed to be a bit aloof.
However, as Anya Ristow points out in the SL Universe thread on this subject:
“The objective was never to make tier or to make money selling virtual dresses. RL brands “failed” because the audience never materialized. RL brands operate on a whole different scale. SL isn’t big enough for them to care. The predicted hundreds of millions of users didn’t come.
Being hip for a few hundred visitors, which is great success for an SL brand, is an embarrassing waste of effort for a RL brand. Even had they been successful by SL standards they wouldn’t have stayed.”
This was in response to my comment:
“I’ve always felt RL brands failed in SL fashion not because the items were crap, although they may have been, but because instead of building from a small base and expanding, they felt that their name on a sim would have people flocking.
Second Life is a different market, they have to build their brand like everyone else, they should have been renting in other malls like everyone else used to, or sponsoring a mall, or interacting with other big Second Life merchants and working their way up the ladder.”
Whereas I feel my assessment is correct on a better way for RL brands to engage with Second Life, there’s no doubt that Anya is correct about the lack of eyes on the prize, Second Life is a big world and the users are spread thinly across it, when you get to thirty or forty people in a sim it starts to creak and for an RL brand, thirty to forty is something they wouldn’t be too bothered about, indeed RL brands seem at times to forget that they have a place in Second Life, USD$295 a month to a corp is peanuts.
The empty sims, they’ve been here for a while and this is partially because of how many sims there are, when you’re new and see nobody around, it can seem empty, although it was worse when we had the bot issues and people would teleport to a place that looked busy but there was nobody really there, now that was more creepy. I don’t see so many bots these days, although there are still some around, but yes, there have long been issues with the social aspect of Second Life and where people can go etc. This situation still needs fixing, but there are people around if you look, even at low peak hours there will be busy places around.
However there are plenty of people in Second Life, plenty of people buying virtual fashion items, attending virtual music shows and clubs and creating virtual art, I keep meaning to pop along to Bryn Oh’s latest exhibition entitled Anna’s Many Murders.
Linden Lab are pushing machninma, improving their communications and notifications via the login page, still unfortunately pushing Zuckerberg’s baby, but they can’t get everything right. The point really is that Second Life is far from in the last throes, yes Linden Lab do need to find new revenue streams and make changes. There are rumours that a timeline for the introduction of Mesh will be announced this month, my understanding is that Mesh won’t be introuduced this month, just a timeline for its introduction, but I could be wrong, I’ve not been keeping up with Mesh developments.
However the main point really, Second Life is still alive and far from being in the emergency room, how it all pans out nobody can predict but it’s certainly not like a disaster movie, unless you’re in a sim based on one!