Second Life is 10 times the size of Manhattan and inhabited by 45000 people simultaneously. Hence many places are sparsely populated, with users clustering in groups according to their interests and social bonds. With respect to the 70 avatars per 16 acre “region” supported by one server, the common misconception is that this limitation is the fault of the Second Life technology. In fact, a lot of it has to do with the inability of the user’s computers to draw more than that many complex avatars simultaneously.

At the end of the day, I think that this debate is much ado about nothing. Here’s the bottom line. Users spent 22 million hours in Second Life last month. The average session is something like 2 hours. This speaks to an experience that’s just different than lots of things to which it is often benchmarked. Today, our clients don’t reach a mass audience in Second Life (they tend to average 10K - 100K visitors). Instead, they connect with a small but very passionate base of users in a very profound way Those users then form a community and tend to blog about their experience, where a much larger audience is reached.

At the end of the day, this is very early in a long-term trend. That trend involves people using the net to connect in a more real and personal way with other people and companies. Second Life is just a part of this movement — so is Gaia Online, Stardoll.com, Zwinktopia, as well as Digg.com and a broad variety of web 2.0 sites that we all take for granted.

Over the next year, we’ll see the social networks becoming more “avatarized” and the virtual worlds becoming more “socially networked”. And the commentary, both positive and negative, is healthy. What really matters are users’ preferences and the adoption rates in these environments clearly indicate that people like connecting directly with other people in immersive and humanlike ways. Is that really so surprising?

I have been in SL a while, built and scripted more than a few things, and have about 3,000 hours inworld, so I guess I’m an expert. Based on this I offer up my observations:

First, the context here is about commercial use of SL, not the social networking aspect. The vast majority of people in SL are there for the latter, not the former, so any population information applied to commercial use should be deeply discounted. Anecdotal data and my research instincts tell me that less than 10% of the population, and likely less than 5%, are viable customers.

SL is an excellent tool for certain situations. Small group situations where the aspect of 3D adds value is the current sweet spot. Collaborative workgroup settings where it’s beneficial to interact with a 3D model, share slide/video-based information, and chat/talk with the other members of the group in real-time are perfect applications of SL.

To Ruben’s point, SL is not the only technology available. There are many alternatives, both public and private, for virtual environments. This said, SL is the current 800-pound gorilla unless your market is children.

SL is not yet a ‘market place’ due to the population issues noted above as well as the wrong-headed approach of many companies, hence the deserted locations. People do not come to SL to shop for RL things yet. They might do so one day when companies who’s products benefit from a 3D representation establish an integrated approach that connects their RL, web, and SL marketing efforts.

SL technology, while architected poorly, is far from outdated. In fact, it is revolutionary. So much so it challenges the processing power of many client systems. The performance issues, such as limiting avatars and lag time, are related to the computational burden of passing large amounts of data between the server and the client. As it was with the Internet in the early ’90s, advances in computational, interface, and communications technology will diminish this issue over the next few years.

So, if a company has a product where a virtual world (VW) setting adds value, they should establish a pilot program in SL to get some experience working in a VW. It’s early, but the experience gained will be invaluable as technology matures and acceptance of VW use in commercial settings reaches critical mass.

I would love to hear the reaction to this story. Are the Old Schoolers simply not getting it, or are we all getting taken for a ride?

Two points in the article seem to stick:
1) SL seems deserted; and

2) This is because the software is outdated — and because the servers can only handle up to 70 avatars at a time.

I am new to SL and very interested in the format and the possibilities. But these are serious limiations! I would love an expert’s response here.

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