Archive for 24 April, 2007
Taking a step back to look at Second Life
I’ve been thinking about Second Life recently and it seems to me that its quite an exclusive world – you either ‘get it’ or you don’t. If you’ve grown up playing computer games and especially role-play games, it’s a very comfortable environment, but if you’re more of a Microsoft office type person, its all very alien and hard going.
Add to that the amount of time required to understand the world and maintain an active presence in it and I think that although Second Life will undoubtedly be/is a real force and an active online community, but it won’t become part of everyday life for everyone.
Which means that any activity organisations use to get feedback/buy-in from users will inevitably have skewed results as it only attracts (and crucially retains) the ‘get its’.
The retention issue is a real problem. Some reports estimate that only 10% of those signed up to Second Life are active users, visiting at least once a week. Which leaves an awful lot of dormant accounts (including mine) included in the hype. According to CNN, only 16% of October ’06 registrants were still using the service 30 days later.
