Second Life nominated to Fiasco Awards 2009

This website http://www.fiascoawards.com/continguts/general/votacions.php is nominating Second Life as one of their finalists for the Fiasco Awards 2009. The award is for techonology projects which started as a good idea but crashed.

The brief about SL says:
Second Life is a virtual world, who let the user live a second life. You download it, install and browse through a social network...it was created as a place to share and offer to the companies the opportunity to study the behavior of users...

The big mistake was about how it works. You must download it, install and run. This exclude all the people who dont have the program in the computer. Also the hard learning process and difficult tutorials make that users reject it.

What we learned about this experience?
The apps, games and social networks must evolve in time. Actually has no sense download an app as Second Life when you have other offers which just need connection to internet. If you want to reach the big market, youhave to make it easy for them.

What do you think? is SL a big fiasco? I guess that after the bubble exploded, a lot of media and companies dont want to try SL, so actually we the single users are who support this place. I guess that LL must make it easy for us with best tools and reducing the tier

Which shows the Fiasco awards are manned by idiots. Ooh, I have to download software and run it. Only a technogeek could do *that*. :/

"Browse though a social network" ... hahaha. These people don't even know what SL is. Who cares.

edit: No, SL isn't for everyone. One must have enough mental aptitude to be able to download, install and operate the client - and I'm DAMN glad for it!

It's a fiasco because you have to download it? ZOMG, the horror!!

Presumably any other software you have to install is a failure too. Hmm, that includes... everything that isn't on your computer when you buy it.

Admittedly, the learning curve for SL can be a bit steep for some, but I never thought it was crippling. It's not like you have to learn all the intricacies of building and scripting in one go (or ever, for that matter) to enjoy it.

it just sounds like they are as lost as the rest..they still don't know what it is..
if 80k online isn't the big market and reaching then i don't know what is..
like phil said..take a game like word of warcraft that comes on a few disks..second life is terabytes and all put in by the users..
it's defiantly not for the an avg gamer looking to play some game..
you need to put your brain to work in here if you want to do anything..
myself i would rather have a big learning curve..
not something i can play and finish in two days..

Since when was the goal ever to offer to company the opportunity to study the behavior of users?

Shows how little they understand SL if they think it is all about games and social networking and that it is basically the same as the internet chat apps like facebook, myspace, aol, etc...

to me it's like a 3d internet inside the internet..only you can interact more in this one than you can the other

I think too many people maybe think that you do have to learn all of that at once. I have been in SL for almost 2 years now and I am just now starting to learn about scripting and more than basic 'create a box' building.

I personally think the learning curve is really only there for the ones that don't belong here anyway.

this is how I view SL as well

I also use this view to explain to folks how to use search...

just as you would search the web for something, you search in SL much the same way

just imagine the results are webpages in 3D

(it tends to work to make it easier for newbies to understand the concept and not feel so lost)

it started as a good idea, but clearly didn't crash. even with all the naysayers, it's going strong. typical news reporter, creating news instead of reporting the facts.

This award is a fiasco!

This writing is certainly a fiasco....

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? What droid came up with THAT?

The learning curve is what makes SL so enjoyable and engaging.

Were at the point now where all the inflated expectations and hype are just about over and well see more steady growth and developement over the next 5 years in areas where SL is actually a fantastic and peerless tool for numerous purposes.

Some people just didnt "get it" some of those people will come back around though and SL will reach the masses in the end.

Disclaimer> maybe

Bah, I pulled a better description of SL out of a dark place a few threads back:

Second Life is not Myspace. Second Life is not Google. Second Life is not Amazon. Second Life is not a consumer electronics show, a library, a prime time commercial slot, a bikini wax, or a glossy magazine. Second life is a flaming sword that burns ALL THE WAY TO THE POMMEL. Second life is a quantum superposition. Second life is a snowmobile racing across the tundra. Suddenly, it flips over, pinning you beneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

QFT!

This, exactly.

As if the mere decision to try SL should make the software magically appear on your PC and install itself. Anything else would be... a Fiasco! LOL

Of course if they'd criticised the customer service, outages, support, scalability issues or server problems, we'd have been right alongside them.

For me the strange thing is that they talk about how bad is install a program in your computer, when actually there are other options that dont need that...well as far as i know there's no morpg or virtual enviroment who runs just in the browser...or they are talking about lively? yes that project which was closed by Google.

EDIT: Looks like a whole bunch of people said exactly what I was saying, while I was writing this post. I guess I was a little slow on the draw this time. Oh well. It's nice to see that there's consensus, though. /EDIT



I'll never understand the argument that the barrier to SL is the fact that you have to download and install a program. I won't name names, but I know who started that theory, and I've always felt it to be absolutely ludicrous. People must, and do, download programs every single day, for all kinds of reasons. I very much doubt anyone ever says, "Hey, that Second Life thing looks really cool, but dagnabbit, there's a download involved. I'm so out of here." Come on.

SL's got its issues, sure. But the download isn't one of them.

Also, what's up with their description of SL's intended purpose? "a place to share and offer to the companies the opportunity to study the behavior of users" Huh? Talk about missing the boat. Last I checked, my behavior in SL wasn't being "studied" by anyone, let alone such mysterious, faceless entities as "companies". If one were inclined to do that kind of research, I could think of much easier ways to go about it than to spend millions of dollars, and countless man hours, creating such an unbelievably complex thing as SL. What exactly are these Fiasco Awards guys smoking?

Oh, and Arkantos, I hate to break it to you, but it's ALWAYS been the individual users who have driven and supported SL. The only reason the "bubble" you speak of, when a disproportionately large amount of corporations were developing a presence in SL, even existed in the first place was because SL had a lot of people in it. It was almost a fad for a while. From what I was able to glean from working as a content developer for the very coporations we're talking about, the talk at board meetings for a while pretty much amounted to, "My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night, and he said this whole Second Life thing is something we should check out. I guess it's pretty serious."

Exactly why that particular bubble burst, or at least reduced in size, I'm not sure, but I have my theories. Remember what I said about knowing who started the "download barrier" theory? Well, that particular person and his followers are not without a degree of (self-serving) influence with the powers that be at a lot of these same corporations.

But even at its peak, the corporate presence in SL was less than 1% of the total population. While it did get a nice amount of press for a while, it was never anything that would make or break SL. SL was doing fine before those corporations showed up, and it's done just as well in the time since so many of them left. The presence or absence of any corporation, or any hundred corporations, makes no difference. SL thrives because its users want it to. That's how it's always been, and that's how it will always be.


Anyway, while we're on the subject of fiasco's, how about we look at the fiascoawards.com itself? I've got English clearly selected at the top of the page. But when I click on any of the links for descriptions of the nominees, they're in Spanish. Is that not the makings a "fisaco" right there?

And I gotta love the fact that they've got an option for Catalan, one of the most obscure languages on the planet, understood by all of .2% of the world, and actively spoken by even less. I'm surprised they didn't also include Sanskrit while they were at it. Obscure languages could well be described as fiascos themselves.

I wasn't able to find the English translation for SL's description on the site, but if your quote is accurate, then that's a fiasco too. Little things like complete sentences, punctuation, capitalization, etc. would have been nice.

omg hahahaha i love that one the best lol

Dont kill the messenger Chosen, i just published what i saw in that website providing a translation about the brief

About your point of corporations in SL, it's true we always supported SL (the single users) and not the companies. But if you can notice SL always do PR based in how the companies are using SL and never talk about our role in this place.

The problem during the "bubble" was that most of companies which moved to SL didn't take care about how it works and they just bought SIMs, designed huge building and fill them with advertisement waiting that it will work.

Why the hell i should visit a SIM that just have advertisement of a product and nothing to do? Obviusly they didn't understood that this is a different media with different rules.

There certainly seems to be a prevailing wisdom at the moment that a virtual world won't succeed unless it runs directly in a browser without an application download. On the other hand, the things that have tried to do that (Google Lively, ESC's Webflock, etc.) have not been notable successes.

It may be that we'll never get real mass acceptance of 3D worlds if you need a separate download. On the other hand, we once needed a special download to use the World Wide Web (and many of us still choose to download and use browsers other than the ones that come with the OS) and that doesn't seem to have been an obstacle to its acceptance. It's clear to me, at least, that the kinds of lightweight virtual world solutions that can run in a browser (by using Flash or Java or Javascript or whatever) aren't sufficiently capable yet.

So is SL ready to become the 3D internet? Perhaps not yet. Is it a technological fiasco? Not even close.

i feel they totally didn't understand that part of it..
you would think those companies would realize people try to avoid that kind of slam advertising as much as they can..

i'm thinking education is where they are heading..
the learning curve hasn't gotten smaller yet..as far as i can see it's getting bigger the more we invent things in here to use..

so those that think it was hard then better hurry up if they think it's gonna get any easier on them..