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Virtual Life To Replace Physical Relationships?
"Sex With A Real Human? Ugh!"
Second Life Dying A Slow Death As Growth Falls Dramatically
Why do scientists and psychologists fret so much about such an incredibly disappointing online experience as 'Second Life'?
The
UK Telegraph has yet another story propagating the myth that Second Life has seven million, or more, 'residents' and that is going to change the world, as it sucks half the planet into a virtual reality existence. Or something.
But more and more people who have invested heavily in trying to build a business in Second Life are asking : where are all the people?
It's a question worth asking, particularly if you spent big to establish your presence in this fake reality.
Has anyone who uses Second Life ever seen a crowd bigger than a couple of dozen people? Anywhere in there?
From the
UK Telegraph :
The internet-based virtual world Second Life may have a serious impact on people's real life relationships, one of Britain's best-known scientists warned yesterday.
Baroness Susan Greenfield, director of the Royal Institution, said she feared users of the popular simulation could abandon the messy intimacy of "real-life" human relations for two-dimensional liaisons in the virtual world. "People who dismiss it as a game will be in for a rude awakening," she said. "This will have a huge impact on society.
"Offering people the chance to have a permanent soap opera going on, in which they can participate, will be even more pervasive than reality TV such as Big Brother.
"This is the ultimate in that you can be involved, you can interact, but still you are hiding behind an avatar."
Baroness Greenfield wondered whether people who inhabited virtual worlds would come to regard real-life sexual relationships with some queasiness.
"Could it be that in the future they will say, 'A real relationship! Urgh, how horrible,' " she said. "The messiness and squalor of the real world, and the real-time element, might be offset by the more sanitised, two-dimensional reality of Second Life.
"It scares me in one way, and fascinates me in another, in wondering where it will take people. What impact does having a false identity have on your real identity?"
About as much impact as pretending you're the detective in your favourite crime book series?
The Baroness obviously hasn't tried having any kind of fun in Second Life. It may, or may not, have a bright future, but for the hundreds of millions of people who go online every day, all over the world, Second Life is little more than than an interesting diversion, an entertainment of short duration, a trendy tourist stop on the
netpacker world trail.
Second Life is an online phenomena still trying to live up to its enormous publicity hype and mega-hyped reputation. How many corporations have blown tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, building an online presence in Second Life, because they believed all the guff that the Baroness has been suckered in by? That Second Life was somehow going to replace real life experiences for tens or hundreds of millions of people?
People are quite clearly making money flogging their products and services in Second Life, but there is a growing fear amongst the retailers that the traffic stats they hear about are not all they appear to be.
The current "population" of Second Life is just over 5 million people, but daily "active" users can be as low as 30 or 40 thousand people. And users only need only log in for about an hour a month to be counted as "active". In May, only 1.2 million users registered as "active'.
In fact, the economic growth of Second Life is
has slowed dramatically :
The numbers show that growth in unique Second Life users has been steadily slowing since a peak of nearly 50 percent per month in October, 2006.

Slowing growth in the online world is not good business. In fact, it makes people feel panicky, as some of the retailers are clearly
expressing on the official Second Life blog.
There may be more than 5 million members, but how many are actually in the Second Life universe at any one time, actively engaging in talk, activities, relationships or spending money? There are endless locations in Second Life that have cost big name clients extraordinary amounts of money to establish their "presence", but now look like city streets in the movie 28 Days Later. Empty. Lifeless. Devoid of activity.
And as for the Baroness' panic-attack on Second Life sucking up real life, there's anecdotal evidence gathering cred that the sprawl of entertainment options available to the
internet generation is seeing them actually spending less collective time in front of the computer monitors, not more.
With the net,
iPods, video phones, a multitude of gaming options, books and real world sports, the average kid in the US, or the UK, the all important cashed-up youth will probably soon be spending less time online then they were four or five years ago, and definitely less time
zoked out in front of the television, which requires absolutely no interaction at all, just staring.
Second Life appears to be going the way of one of those glitzy
supermalls that spring up in the middle of nowhere, and do well for a few months, and then slowly, quietly go out of business as the customers stop coming. The stores begin to close, the ones who invested the most hang on as long as possible, but a rot, a nefarious reality sets in, that becomes self-perpetuating.
And there are many, many nervous Second Life retailers and business people
wondering how a new mandatory proof-of-age restriction is going to affect their business activities.
Online, the harder you make it for new users to get into something that has caught their interest, the less likely you are to find all those new customers you need to grow exponentially.
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