Off on a rant about Second Life (or Shut Up About Second Life Already)

Ok – so fair warning – rant mode.

Since joining the world of higher education in February of 2008, I must have heard someone, somewhere talk about Second Life as the “next big thing” at least 30 or 40 times.

Guess what – it’s not. Second Life has been the next big thing since it launched in 2003. Next big things don’t have to talk about why their moment is just around the corner. Next big things are too busy having their moment.

Don’t get me wrong – if your thing is creating an avatar, digitizing your surroundings, and figuring out how to drive around in a golf-cart and run in to other people you meet there, more power to you. However, if you’re intention is that you’re going to try to make Second Life part of your business plan, I can save you the time and link you to FailBlog right now.

Why? Well, number one, the usage in Second Life is way overestimated. The number you hear thrown out is “10 million users”. Second Life has “10 million users” the same way Vanilla Ice sold 11 million copies of To the Extreme.

Registrations does not, in any way, represent active usage. Even by the most generous estimates, there are only about 1.2 to 1.5 million active second life users. Worldwide. In 5 years. To put that in perspective, when the iPhone App Store opened up, Apple reported about 60 million applications downloaded in one month, and some of those you had to pay for. Why? Because it was the next big thing – it wasn’t just talking about how it was the next big thing.

But hey, don’t take my word for it – here are some nuggets from around the web. Ken Wheaton, of Advertising Age was told when he dismissed Second Life as an also-ran that he “just didn’t get it”. His response: “There’s a big difference between not getting it and simply thinking something is a waste of time and money.” Bravo, Mr. Wheaton.

PC World cited Second Life as one of its Top 10 biggest web annoyances in 2007, complaining about the clunky interface, steep learning curve for new users, and general lack of anything interesting to do once you get the controls and interface figured out.

Google, which bought in to the hype a bit and jumped on the virtual world bandwagon this summer with Lively just shut the site down after internal examination during a belt-tightening period determined that the demand just wasn’t there. This is Google – the company who keeps “Beer Googles” in as a feature of Gmail – I love them, but they’re not the most discriminating organization when it comes to letting a product hang around and catch on.

That’s not to say that the concept of virtual worlds isn’t an interesting, potentially compelling one – but it is my belief that Second Life as a specific virtual world has missed its window. Just like Friendster during the infancy of the Social Networking boom, it may be a site that just got in a little too early.

The reality is that people just aren’t as interested in Second Life as the hypers seem to believe. One way to determine the popularity of something on the web is to look at the chatter that something demonstrates – across blogs, article mentions, etc. Let’s let a simple picture tell a story.

Don’t tell me – show me. And until you do, if you’re going to spend money on Second Life, send it to me. I have some nice virtual swampland in Florida that I’ll sell you real cheap. I’ll even pay your closing costs for you in “CummingsBucks”.