When I first heard about the interactive website Second Life, I thought “I don’t even have time for my first life, let alone time to create a second one.” And so far, I haven’t made much time for it, judging that until Linden Labs makes the interface easier to use, it wasn’t going to grab that many denizens beyond some digerati and perhaps some folks with too much time on their hands. But I have noticed lots of political hackers, and even some hacks, playing in this new space. One-time presidential candidate Mark Warner did an event in Second Life; the RootsCamp community has been holding a regular weekly meeting there; and Reuters have even set up a bureau with a reporter dedicated to chronicling the news of this rapidly-growing playspace, said (by Reuters) to be approaching two million members with a growth rate that would make MySpace jealous.
Ah, but there’s the rub. Are there really that many people hanging out in Second Life? Clay Shirky, one of the net’s most original thinkers, has posted the definitive critique, which he titled “A Story Too Good to Check.” Here’s his key insight, which should humble everyone hawking tickets to any new booth in the Web 2.0 carnival: “Someone who tries a social service once and bails isn’t really a user any more than someone who gets a sample spoon of ice cream and walks out is a customer.”
Shirky debunks the current wave of press interest in Second Life by reminding us that all this happened around earlier versions of multi-user domains like LambdaMOO, back in the early 1990s. He notes that two-dimensional ways of navigating the web, like using a mouse with a cursor, work quite well for most activities, and argues that the 3-D revolution touted by Second Life’s cheerleaders has scarcely arrived. Furthermore, Shirky asserts that most of the coverage of SL is provider-driven (i.e. companies or organizations pushing stories out about how they were the first to do X in SL), and finally questions whether simultaneous Second Life users breaks 10,000 very often.
Good, sobering stuff. Watch out for Web 2.0 snake oil. It’s just like the earlier kind.
Technorati Tags: Clay Shirky, SecondLife