Second Life is more akin to Altair and Goto.com (which created the personal computer and PPC search marketing industries respectively) than Microsoft and Google (which won their industries by emulating their progenitors). Amazon is an anomaly of a different form in that it is one of very few companies that both pioneered and won their industry.

As Troy mentions, there is no doubt that Second Life has pioneered the virtual worlds industry and laid the groundwork for innovative companies such as Millions of Us and Electric Sheep Company. At the conference, both of these companies discussed their very successful efforts outside of Second Life. Second Life is just one piece in a puzzle that they are building, and its a piece thats likely to have less and less relevance over time.

The problem is when Second Life is referred to as “the elephant in the room” or “industry leading”. How can it be industry leading when it is 5th or 6th in audience size and constantly losing ground?

Prokofy makes a good point that we’re comparing apples and oranges by comparing Second Life, a adult world, to numerous kids-oriented virtual worlds such as Habbo. Thats my point exactly. Second Life is a relatively small apple in a see of bigger oranges. By treating it as the unwarranted focal point of the industry, we run the risk of missing opportunities and making wrong conclusions about what users really want.

*How do you know that the other worlds may not reach their plateaus as well? Some countries have under-18 populations growing faster than other demographics. SL is for adults, so why compare apples to oranges? Where are the other adult worlds? With far, far fewer users at this point.

*Go back and read the official economic statistics page, those figures aren’t correct, there is at least 40% or more women, and women spend more hours on line.

*Again, you seem to be comparing worlds where the object is, broadly speaking to play house or store (Second Life, Habbo, Stardoll) to worlds you aren’t even mentioning where the objective is to play war (WoW)

*This study makes no sense. Make an avatar…to do what? You make an avatar to socialize, have a business, whatever. The posing of the question seems off. If they asked whether people socialize or do business or do non-profit work, they would capture more of the diverse uses of SL which are completely absent from these other things. It’s like saying “We found that there were far fewer Ferrari drivers and 20-speed bike users than Matchbox toy car users.”

* The study about the “disillusionment” over commercialization is pretty misleading. It was made by a European study of European early-adapters who by their nature are the anarcho punk anti-capitalist types who will answer this way. A broader study of all world demographics would find there isn’t anything like this allergy to commerce at all, and if you ask people if they would like companies to rent land or ad space from them, or sponsor their events, they’d give a huge, enthusiastic YES! SL is more like RL — you can’t just expect to drop a product into somebody’s home or store and expect instant acceptance; the only reason you can do that in the MTV world is that there is no user-generated content.

* There’s an utterly false premise here, claiming that the 70 percent of the EU citizens interviewed by the EU polling company somehow contrasts with another segment of 80 percent of MTV users having purchased a brand. A more geographically weighted and balanced study of the entire SL population would likely find that more than 80 percent used the brand because they are adults who can buy their own branded products and not wait to pester parents like the teens in There.com/MTV

So all of your points are based on comparing apples to oranges, taking skewed samples from very biased sources with anti-commerce ideologies in general, and not realizing that this is a world of adults, not kids. Yes, you can sell way more Matchbox toy cars in the kid worlds that have statistically way more kids who who buy way more individualized units of the little cars. But you then have to offset that against an adult market where you could sell a few Ferraris.

No long-term market strategist would set up decision based on pitting one demographic against another if they had products that are bought in real life by all ages.

Second Life is long past the early adopter stage. Early adopters make up a fraction of the population. SL is now populated by the rest of us who came much later, after the beta test was over and the early years. We have homes, relationships, businesses, clubs, live music, non-profits, educational institutions and if any of these people leave Second Life, it’s definitely not going to be for Habbo Hotel or Stardoll. Call me when there’s another persistent 3-D virtual streaming world with user-generated content and a robust economy with real-money trade, then we’ll talk.

Habbo et al are not distilling SL’s essence; they are distilling the essence of TV for the masses — TV that is pushed, prefabricated, controlled for safety and content appropriate to the age group. SL doesn’t distill but transforms the elements of TV, theater, books, media to enable people to make their own lives.

Let’s be honest, if SL didn’t exist, would there even have been an Virtual Worlds conference last week? Their top sponsor was the Electric Sheep Company. Millions of Us was a gold sponsor. Both of those companies got started in SL, and probably wouldn’t have existed if their founders hadn’t met each other in SL.

The other two gold sponsors were There.com and Slippcat. Quote: “The SlippCat system is the first advertising vehicle that has been designed specifically for virtual world applications such as industry-leading Second Life.” Industry-leading. They said it, not me.

There.com is SL’s little cousin, created by Will Harvey and Jeffrey Ventrella. Jeffrey is now at Linden Lab.

Second life residents aren’t “disillusioned with the commercialization of their world.” They enjoy the commercial side of Second Life – the internal economy motivates people to create a lot of great goods and services for each other. There are the sculptures of Starax Statosky / Light Waves, the music of cypress Rosewood, Second Style Magazine, the clothing of Simone, the plants from Heart Garden Center…

So far, the multinational corporations setting up shop in SL haven’t provided much in the way of goods or services (with some notable exceptions, the key word here being *exceptions*). That’s why SL residents are disappointed with them.