What can save Second Life

I'll reference another Trendspotting post here, this one from October citing a ComScore graph of unique visitors to "virtual world" sites. As you can see, Second Life is last on the graph, far below kids sites like Club Penguin and Neopets and the virtual porn site Redlight Center. Considering that Second Life has gotten so much media attention, its ranking here is surprising even for me. So what can Second Life to keep itself from falling into AOL chat room-type obsoleteness?

Well, it seems that the academic world is still quite hyped about Second Life and its potential. After the casual internet audience and major marketers have taken a pass on Second Life, it would make sense for the the land of Linden to concentrate on their relationship with academia. They should work on making Second Life a viable place for distance learning.

To do this, they should:
--Make it possible to password-protect class sites so that only registered students can attend and to avoid any embarrassing interuption by any graphically-endowed furries. (Unless this feature is already available?)

--Vastly simplify the interface so that learning the course content will be the focus for a user rather than having to figure out how to get your avatar to sit, or to keep it from listing to the side constantly and looking like Otis in the Mayberry jail.

--Provide a "lite" viewer with greatly reduced hardware requirements--one that works within a standard web browser would be best.

--Provide more "asynchronous" communication features--discussion boards, document storage, etc. (Many Second Life advocates point to the fact that the great advantage of Second Life is that it provides "synchronous " communication for people across the planet. That is true, but so does a telephone. The real power of the internet comes from the asynchronous communication it facilitates. With tools as basic as an email listserv, I can have an ongoing discussion about 1970s German Progrock with someone in Jakarta without either of us having to alter our sleep schedules. That is what is awesome about the internet.)

Second Life will never be everything for everyone. But with some effort it might become something for someone.

Trends suggest otherwise

Most of the world has already moved on from Second Life. It was receiving immense publicity about this time last year, as succesful press releases about the first widget store to start selling virtual widgets on Second Life were turned into stories in newspapers across the country. But 2007 was ultimately unkind to the land of Linden.

The blog TrendSpotting tracks traffic and search queries to determine current buzz and has named Second Life as the dissapointment of the year (along with the as yet unreleased Google Phone.) Indeed, searches for and blog posts about Second Life have steadily decreased throughout the year--as has total traffic on Second Life itself. No growth on the internet is the same as negative growth. The people enjoying Second Life at the end of 2007 are the same as the people enjoying Second Life at the beginning of 2007. All the users that signed up during that time never came back.

Many of the more verbose Second Life advocates in the comments of SLIS21 are from folks with, well, a little more experience in the age department. It seems mostly to be the boomer generation and older who are the most excited about Second Life. Frankly, if you have forty-some years of professional experience, any technology you are introducing to your undergrad students is not a cutting edge technology. If there is any situation where the "master" should learn from the student, it is here. Today's undergrads have spent their entire lives with the internet. They know it better than you. The way they use the internet today is they way we all will use it tomorrow. And that means a wireless internet made up of small, mobile applications accessed by small, mobile devices. Not a 3D environment requiring major hardware.

Introduction

So this blog will begin as a continuation of the discussion about Second Life on the SJSU SLIS students listserve and a post on the SLIS21 blog. This is to create a dedicated forum for this discussion and to take it out from under the noses of people who could care less. My opinions are well-documented and there will be an obvious bias in these posts, however, comments are encouraged and, aside from obvious spam, will be left intact and unedited by me. So please feel free to tell me I am wrong in as many ways possible.

If this blog is succesful, if there is interest, and if I feel like it, it will expand to include thoughts and news about any and all emerging communication technologies and their viability.

For now, we will move on to some posts about Second Life.

And, just to clarify, I don't think that the San Jose State Library and Information Science School shouldn't be involved in Second Life. It's perfectly fine. I just don't think it should be used a major selling point for the school, and Second Life definitely shouldn't be promoted as some sort of spectacular future for online communication. Because it isn't.

So this blog is not here to encourage SJSU SLIS to abandon Second Life. (It and every other institution that has hitched itself to the Second Life wagon will be abandoned by the demise of Second Life in due time.) I just like to be right, and I'm 99% sure that I am right about Second Life. After the initial few posts, there will be relatively few direct references to SJSU at all. This blog should be for everyone and anyone interested.