Second Life on the Decline?
Via a posting in Lars’ personal blog, I just became aware of the press coverage of the (supposed or real?) exodus of companies and single users from Second Life.
Quite apart from the fact that the zdnet-Artikel gives the number of unique users with 5,2 million, whereas the Linden Lab counter shows 8,150,180 total residents (and yes, apart from the question of how many of these are actually active), I cannot be worried.
In my opinion, a bit of a hype is a good thing to start with, but that’s not something you can expect to continue indefinitely.
In an interview with Technology Review, Ian Hughes from IBM once more confirms IBM’s belief that virtual worlds (be it Second Life or another platform) present a unique opportunity for business, collaboration, events, school and training.
Of course, it’s the last aspect I’m most interested in personally – and the fact that sales figures in SL are going down because avatars do not really need all these products to survive has absolutely no impact on that.
The potential of virtual worlds to not only communicate, but also to give this much-valued sense of “presence” remains, at least to me, beyond all question.