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Some valid questions about Second Life
Clay Shirky has been on a mission to debunk Linden Labs‘ claim of “two million registered users” for Second Life (or, specifically, Linden’s refusal to correct those who’ve made that claim), and has done so with icy effectiveness. He’s emerged as one of the leading Second Life skeptics, asking more questions about Second Life here and here. I should also say that Valleywag commenter tparisi wrote a thoughtful rebuttal to Shirky (one, however, that doesn’t question his statistical conclusions.)
IBM’s a great believer in the potential of virtual worlds; the team at eightbar created perhaps the best Second Life blog around, and Irving Wladawsky-Berger has offered some deep insight on what the growth of virtual worlds might lead to. Over 1,000 IBMers have joined IBM’s Second Life community; our CEO led an in-world event and most recently we introduced 12 new islands. All levels of the company - including some functions you wouldn’t normally expect - are aggressively exploring how to effectively use Second Life during the course of business.
With that level of participation comes the responsibility to ask tough questions. I think you’ll see IBM exert that kind of leadership as we continue exploring the potential of virtual worlds in the new year.
Shirky is not the first to debunk the numbers - many actual humans who have SL accounts have done so quite publicly. That it took so long for others to pick up on it seems somewhat… odd.
That said, I have yet to hear anything compelling regarding how the number of users of SecondLife is worthwhile in anything other than support for the grid itself.
Perhaps some perspective is in order?
In late 1999 (or was it early 2000?), The Palace, a user-generated virtual world system, (then a Communities.Com product) hit 3,000,000 registered users (generated reg-codes that were used at least once.) It typically more than 20,000+ users online at once during peak hours (but that included up to 10% unregistered users, not included in the 3M number above). It had been featured in Time Magazine.
Sound kinda familiar?
Interesting , Randall. What happened to it?
The whole two-million-not-being-two-million isn’t exactly new, as Taran/Nobody points out. It wasn’t new at one million or at one-hundred thousand either.
If you wanted the story behind the numbers, five minutes dancing with Google would have sufficed.
Clay spent that time. Did IBM?
Communities.com (a company that I co-founded) was the owner of The Palace when it died it’s third and final horrible commercial death at the end of the dotcom boom. There was no way The Palace was ever going to generate enough money to be a business (except for the few developers.)
Un-officially, it lives on as abandonware, supported by the core customers who have no source code or IP rights: http://www.thepalace.com
Every year or two, one of the die-hards contacts me in the hope of getting their hands on some source code. I keep having to send them away to the IP holder - a bunch of lawyers with a filing cabinet.