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.