Sweden opened an embassy in Second Life this year. Reuters has a bureau there with a correspondent who files stories. IBM has islands. Adidas has a shop. There is a serious conversation happening in marketing departments about whether a company can afford not to have a presence.
The number driving all of this is six million registered residents, and it is being reported as though it means six million people.
Go and look at the concurrency figure instead. Linden publishes it. At a busy hour there are something like thirty or forty thousand people logged in at once. Even allowing generously for time zones and for people who log in weekly rather than daily, you do not get from that number to anything close to six million active anything. Registration counts everyone who ever made an account, including the enormous number who made one, spent eleven minutes failing to work out how to walk, and never came back.
I made the same mistake in February when I wrote about Twitter and reached for signup numbers because they were the numbers available. They are always the numbers available. They are also the least informative thing a platform can tell you, which is precisely why they are the ones that get announced.
Spend an evening visiting corporate islands and the gap becomes physical. They are empty. Not quiet, empty. Someone has paid a development agency a real sum of money to model a building, and there is nobody in it, and there was nobody in it yesterday. A colleague described walking through one as being in a shopping centre after closing time, and that is exactly right.
None of which means Second Life is fake. There is a genuine community in there and some of what they have built is remarkable. People run real businesses selling things that exist only inside it. The interesting part was always going to be what users make, and users have made a great deal.
The problem is that the community is not the market the brands think they are buying into, and it does not want to be. The people who spend hours in there every week are not there to visit a car manufacturer’s pavilion. Putting a shop where they live does not make it a high street.
So my expectation is a fairly ugly eighteen months. Someone senior will ask what the island returned, the answer will be a visitor count that cannot be defended, the budget will move, and the islands will sit there paying tier until somebody remembers to cancel. Then there will be a wave of coverage declaring the whole thing a failure, which will be just as wrong in the other direction.
What will actually have happened is that a modest, strange, genuinely creative community was briefly mistaken for a mass market by people who read one number and stopped.