Comments aren't enabled so I figured I'd post this here..
M Linden was recently interviewed via email by a reporter for the BBC who was working on a story that would be “a look at Second Life today - what's it up to, where's it going, why so quiet in the media after such great press a few years ago, etc.”
The article was published today, and for us, it was disappointing to see that the piece was less a look at Second Life today and more a focus on the experience some organizations had with their Second Life experiments several years ago. We hope that in the future, we might interest the journalist in taking a closer look at some of what’s happening in Second Life today – we’d love to bring her inworld so she can see firsthand that there’s much more to the virtual world.
In the meantime, we thought we’d share the full text of M’s recent interview (below) to provide the full context of the information we shared. We encourage you to have a read of the interview below and the resulting article here, and to add your comments to the discussion on the BBC piece to share your perspective about Second Life today.
The interview:
What do you make of the media hype that surrounded Second Life (the next big thing) in 06/07? What do you make of the drop off of Second Life mentions in the press since (for UK press - in 2007 there were nearly 200 mentions and in 2009 up until today there were barely 60).
At the time, the social Web was evolving in ways people couldn’t imagine and the massive popular interest in Second Life was evidence of the power of the experience. The idea of an online virtual world, connecting people globally, offering an open-ended experience, where users can create whatever they can dream, and even make money doing it is a world-changing concept. In 06/07 it really resonated with the press and fueled rampant interest in Second Life. People (and press) are naturally attracted to exciting, transformative new technologies, which we can see from the invention of the television 80 years ago to today with the invention of Twitter and the iPhone.
If you look at Gartner’s Hype Cycle for emerging technologies, Second Life is a case-study example – we enjoyed an unprecedented level of media attention during the peak of the ‘hype’ and then suffered through some negative press when that died down, but now we’re coming through the other side of that. The press came and some of them left, but our users stayed and our user base grew. Every month, about a million people from around the world log-in to Second Life, where they spend about 40 million hours inworld, and participate in a virtual economy that will exceed USD500 million this year.
I am aware of the new business venture Enterprise that was announced two weeks ago, so prior to Enterprise did you find that Second Life was struggling to keep corporate business presence considering quite a few of them joined and then left one year -to- two years later (Reuters, American Apparel, Coca Cola, etc). Has social media sites like Facebook and Twitter had anything to do with that?
Actually, it hasn’t been a struggle to keep corporate presence in Second Life – in fact, there are a great number of companies in Second Life today, although there has been an evolution of corporate use of Second Life since 2006/2007. Some companies, like those you mention, experimented early on with marketing in Second Life. Some of them had mixed results, which you would expect in an emerging medium. Since the early experimentation, we’ve seen an increase in organizations using the virtual world as an enterprise collaboration tool.
Today, more than 1,400 organizations around the world, including universities, nonprofits, and large companies (including a number of the Fortune 500) are using Second Life for collaboration and prototyping, learning and training, and meetings and events. Second Life allows organizations to do this without the cash and carbon cost of real world travel, and companies have already seen real world benefits from working in the virtual world (I’d recommend checking out our case studies at http://work.secondlife.com/en-US/successstories/ and on our Working Inworld blog: https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/workinginworld).
Our new product, Second Life Enterprise, was created in response to market demand for a standalone version of Second Life that organizations can host behind their own firewalls for an additional level of data privacy. It’s currently in beta, with 14 customers, including the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, IBM, and Northrop Grumman.
We’re don’t compete with social media sites like Facebook or Twitter for users or corporate customers, so no, we’ve not seen their rise negatively impact us. In fact, social media sites/tools are a great complement to Second Life. When I am in Second Life, I often Tweet my location so my followers can meet me inworld.
With Enterprise is Second Life gearing its direction more toward a business client? Considering there are other business-focused platforms out there, is this more the way of SL's future?
No. Enterprise and education are important markets for us; the launch of the beta for Second Life Enterprise is a key step forward in serving those markets, and more is planned for the future, including a new entry path tailored for enterprise users of Second Life that we plan to roll out early in 2010. However, the great majority of our business is still the individual consumer, and that is our primary focus. This works because we are a platform that can accommodate almost any use-case a user can imagine.
On your site I was able to locate the number of users online at any one time - just with the figures that are there the number has decreased from Oct 1 until today - what do you make of this? And can I get figures that date further back?
The average number of avatars inworld at any time of course varies. In Q3 of this year, our peak concurrency (the peak number of avatars inworld at once) was more than 77,000. This is a decrease from our all-time peak of 88,000 as a result of a policy we put in place disallowing certain uses of ‘bots’ (automated avatars).
Second Life usage remains strong. Monthly repeat logins, a metric we use to gauge the number of users engaged with Second Life, grew 23% from September 2008 to September 2009. Residents spent more than 118 million hours in Second Life in Q3 (a 15% increase from Q3 2008, though also impacted by the policy on ‘bots’), and user-to-user transactions hit an all-time high in Q3 at USD150 million.
What does the future hold for Second Life?
Second Life will continue to grow and become a part of more people’s daily lives. We’ll accomplish this in a number of ways, including making it easier for new users to get started in Second Life and developing a multitude of ways to connect with the virtual world. In the near term, we’ll be launching a redesigned version of the Second Life Viewer (the software you use to connect to the virtual world) that’s much more user-friendly and intuitive, and we’ll be continuing with our localization efforts to further support our users outside of the US, who make up more than 60% of our customers.
Speaking of figures can I get figures for number of members as well?
On average, about a million unique users log into Second Life each month, spending an average of 40 hours each. In October, about 75,000 users logged in from the UK, spending more than 2.5 million hours. Europe is an important market for us – and the UK specifically. We have an office in Brighton which houses customer support and development resources and we are opening an office in Amsterdam shortly so that we can bring talent and infrastructure closer to our end-user markets.
The article was published today, and for us, it was disappointing to see that the piece was less a look at Second Life today and more a focus on the experience some organizations had with their Second Life experiments several years ago. We hope that in the future, we might interest the journalist in taking a closer look at some of what’s happening in Second Life today – we’d love to bring her inworld so she can see firsthand that there’s much more to the virtual world.
In the meantime, we thought we’d share the full text of M’s recent interview (below) to provide the full context of the information we shared. We encourage you to have a read of the interview below and the resulting article here, and to add your comments to the discussion on the BBC piece to share your perspective about Second Life today.
The interview:
What do you make of the media hype that surrounded Second Life (the next big thing) in 06/07? What do you make of the drop off of Second Life mentions in the press since (for UK press - in 2007 there were nearly 200 mentions and in 2009 up until today there were barely 60).
At the time, the social Web was evolving in ways people couldn’t imagine and the massive popular interest in Second Life was evidence of the power of the experience. The idea of an online virtual world, connecting people globally, offering an open-ended experience, where users can create whatever they can dream, and even make money doing it is a world-changing concept. In 06/07 it really resonated with the press and fueled rampant interest in Second Life. People (and press) are naturally attracted to exciting, transformative new technologies, which we can see from the invention of the television 80 years ago to today with the invention of Twitter and the iPhone.
If you look at Gartner’s Hype Cycle for emerging technologies, Second Life is a case-study example – we enjoyed an unprecedented level of media attention during the peak of the ‘hype’ and then suffered through some negative press when that died down, but now we’re coming through the other side of that. The press came and some of them left, but our users stayed and our user base grew. Every month, about a million people from around the world log-in to Second Life, where they spend about 40 million hours inworld, and participate in a virtual economy that will exceed USD500 million this year.
I am aware of the new business venture Enterprise that was announced two weeks ago, so prior to Enterprise did you find that Second Life was struggling to keep corporate business presence considering quite a few of them joined and then left one year -to- two years later (Reuters, American Apparel, Coca Cola, etc). Has social media sites like Facebook and Twitter had anything to do with that?
Actually, it hasn’t been a struggle to keep corporate presence in Second Life – in fact, there are a great number of companies in Second Life today, although there has been an evolution of corporate use of Second Life since 2006/2007. Some companies, like those you mention, experimented early on with marketing in Second Life. Some of them had mixed results, which you would expect in an emerging medium. Since the early experimentation, we’ve seen an increase in organizations using the virtual world as an enterprise collaboration tool.
Today, more than 1,400 organizations around the world, including universities, nonprofits, and large companies (including a number of the Fortune 500) are using Second Life for collaboration and prototyping, learning and training, and meetings and events. Second Life allows organizations to do this without the cash and carbon cost of real world travel, and companies have already seen real world benefits from working in the virtual world (I’d recommend checking out our case studies at http://work.secondlife.com/en-US/successstories/ and on our Working Inworld blog: https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/workinginworld).
Our new product, Second Life Enterprise, was created in response to market demand for a standalone version of Second Life that organizations can host behind their own firewalls for an additional level of data privacy. It’s currently in beta, with 14 customers, including the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, IBM, and Northrop Grumman.
We’re don’t compete with social media sites like Facebook or Twitter for users or corporate customers, so no, we’ve not seen their rise negatively impact us. In fact, social media sites/tools are a great complement to Second Life. When I am in Second Life, I often Tweet my location so my followers can meet me inworld.
With Enterprise is Second Life gearing its direction more toward a business client? Considering there are other business-focused platforms out there, is this more the way of SL's future?
No. Enterprise and education are important markets for us; the launch of the beta for Second Life Enterprise is a key step forward in serving those markets, and more is planned for the future, including a new entry path tailored for enterprise users of Second Life that we plan to roll out early in 2010. However, the great majority of our business is still the individual consumer, and that is our primary focus. This works because we are a platform that can accommodate almost any use-case a user can imagine.
On your site I was able to locate the number of users online at any one time - just with the figures that are there the number has decreased from Oct 1 until today - what do you make of this? And can I get figures that date further back?
The average number of avatars inworld at any time of course varies. In Q3 of this year, our peak concurrency (the peak number of avatars inworld at once) was more than 77,000. This is a decrease from our all-time peak of 88,000 as a result of a policy we put in place disallowing certain uses of ‘bots’ (automated avatars).
Second Life usage remains strong. Monthly repeat logins, a metric we use to gauge the number of users engaged with Second Life, grew 23% from September 2008 to September 2009. Residents spent more than 118 million hours in Second Life in Q3 (a 15% increase from Q3 2008, though also impacted by the policy on ‘bots’), and user-to-user transactions hit an all-time high in Q3 at USD150 million.
What does the future hold for Second Life?
Second Life will continue to grow and become a part of more people’s daily lives. We’ll accomplish this in a number of ways, including making it easier for new users to get started in Second Life and developing a multitude of ways to connect with the virtual world. In the near term, we’ll be launching a redesigned version of the Second Life Viewer (the software you use to connect to the virtual world) that’s much more user-friendly and intuitive, and we’ll be continuing with our localization efforts to further support our users outside of the US, who make up more than 60% of our customers.
Speaking of figures can I get figures for number of members as well?
On average, about a million unique users log into Second Life each month, spending an average of 40 hours each. In October, about 75,000 users logged in from the UK, spending more than 2.5 million hours. Europe is an important market for us – and the UK specifically. We have an office in Brighton which houses customer support and development resources and we are opening an office in Amsterdam shortly so that we can bring talent and infrastructure closer to our end-user markets.
See the blog for clicky links and such..
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