When I wrote Twit­ter Is What Sec­ond Life Wasn’t: Light, Cheap and Open I was address­ing some­thing sim­ple, “the hype sur­round­ing Twit­ter may well be hype but isn’t the same sort of hype that Sec­ond Life enjoyed 2–3 years ago, and here’s why.” Well, I for­got how pas­sion­ate Sec­ond Lif­ers are and so it goes.  So it was deli­cious to dis­cover the 20-or-so com­ments in response to my recent AdAge Dig­i­tal­Next arti­cle.

Here’s the com­ments through to today:

By jason_miletsky | totowa, NJ June 26, 2009 05:32:15 pm:

I’m not a fan of Sec­ond life by any means – I’ve writ­ten plenty of scathing blog posts on its demise myself (http://bit.ly/Qat0k), and I am absolutely a fan of Twit­ter. But I don’t think Sec­ond Life vs. Twit­ter is a fair com­par­i­son. Far from the cliched apples and oranges, this is more like apples and marshmallows.Twitter exists as a source of infor­ma­tion, news, gos­sip, updates, con­ver­sa­tion – it’s a plat­form for com­mu­ni­ca­tion between friends, fam­i­lies or even brands and their con­sumers. But all it takes is a lit­tle effort to fol­low peo­ple who share your inter­est, and all of sud­den every col­umn of Tweet­Deck is filled with life – the empty room we’re all tweet­ing in at the start can get pretty crowded pretty quickly. Same with Face­book – maybe it’s a walled in envi­ron­ment, but any­body who makes the slight­est effort to con­nect with peo­ple can log in and see some activity.

None of that is true with Sec­ond Life, which would have ben­e­fited from a few more bound­aries (vitu­tally geo­graph­i­cally speak­ing). Sec­ond Life offers so much space there sim­ply aren’t enough peo­ple to occupy it, so it becomes very lonely very quickly. Really, there’s noth­ing more depress­ing than wan­der­ing around an enor­mous Sec­ond Life mall and being the only one there. It’s right about them when you look up and real­ize, huh…maybe my first life isn’t so bad after all. So once the joy of fly­ing is over (usu­ally after the first 5 min­utes), there’s just not a lot more to do there.

How­ever, I think both Face­book and Twit­ter face some of the same dan­gers that Sec­ond Life ulti­mately suc­cumbed to, and that the increas­ingly vis­i­ble pres­ence of spam­mers, get-rich-quick schemes and sex push­ers. More and more often I find myself unfol­low­ing some­one on Twit­ter who wants to show me how they made $5,000 post­ing Tweets, or how I can get thou­sands of new fol­low­ers. Face­book is no dif­fer­ent – I’m sure by now every­one on there has got­ten a few sus­pi­cious e-mails from crooks try­ing to steal their name and pass­word. If it hap­pens enough, peo­ple will even­tu­ally stay away from these net­works and look else­where for their net­work­ing. They’ll still be around, but they’ll be a shadow of their for­mer selves – Sec­ond Life still exists, but it’s lit­tle more than a vir­tual Red Light Dis­trict in some seedy part of town.

I’m sorry – did I say that there was noth­ing more depress­ing than wan­der­ing around an empty Sec­ond Life mall? That was wrong – watch­ing a Sec­ond Life strip­per grind against a vir­tual pole goes well beyond depress­ing, and bor­der on sim­ply pathetic.

Jason Milet­sky
CEO, PFS Mar­ketwyse
Author, ‘Per­spec­tives on Mar­ket­ing’ and ‘Per­spec­tives on Branding’

http://www.pfsmarketwyse.com

http://twitter.com/jason_miletsky

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By chrisabra­ham | Berlin June 26, 2009 07:08:19 pm:

I agree with you. I don’t think you can com­pare them either, which is why I wrote this. Peo­ple keep on say­ing, “Twit­ter hype is just like what hap­pened with Sec­ond Life. Nope.

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By jason_miletsky | totowa, NJ June 26, 2009 07:24:17 pm:

Ah – Sorry, Chris, if I mis­un­der­stood your point there. Thanks for clar­i­fy­ing, and for bring­ing the topic to atten­tion. Good piece.Jason

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By chrisabra­ham | Berlin June 26, 2009 08:39:58 pm:

Well, I am glad we’re on the same page. Actu­ally, I am glad that you com­mented here — thanks!

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By valen­cio | Dubai June 27, 2009 03:26:38 am:

I will rec­om­mend using Email Charger for all bulk email mar­ket­ing needs. Its the best bulk email mar­ket­ing soft­ware I have used so far.

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By MarcoP123 | Philadel­phia, PA June 27, 2009 09:26:48 am:

There’s really no com­par­i­son between Sec­ond Life and Twit­ter. Sec­ond Life is a vehi­cle for peo­ple to escape real­ity and cre­ate new ones. Twit­ter is a vehi­cle for peo­ple to share real­ity quickly and suc­cinctly. I do strate­gic con­sult­ing work for a Philadel­phia based full-service mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions agency (http://www.domusinc.com). I also have some mus­ings on the Domus blog site (http://domusinc.blogspot.com). In those two capac­i­ties, I see and work with cus­tomers who imme­di­ately under­stand and want to be part of the Twit­ter com­mu­nity – a much faster adop­tion rate than so many pre­vi­ous technologies.

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By ASantiago23 | Lake­land, FL June 27, 2009 12:44:45 pm:

Thank you for this great arti­cle. I find it so inter­est­ing how Ad Age writ­ing are so pro or against “social media.” Twit­ter is phe­nom­e­nal. It has given me and my projects more real read­ers and fol­low­ers than MySpace, Face­book, Live Jour­nal, and Pure Vol­ume together.I am really intrigued with what will come next from them. And yes, the Iran explo­sion via Twit­ter, I think, is the sep­a­rat­ing fac­tor between Twit­ter and the rest.

But ulti­mately, I think that Google Wave will CRUSH everyone!

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By chrisabra­ham | Berlin June 27, 2009 12:54:58 pm:

“But ulti­mately, I think that Google Wave will CRUSH everyone!”I will believe it when I see it — and I sort of believe it already — how­ever, Twit­ter has an amaz­ing lead and might very well ben­e­fit from mak­ing itself more of a need than a want.

See­ing the State Depart­ment pre­empt a sched­uled Twit­ter main­te­nance because of what was going on in Iran was huge. I don’t think any of us have real­ized how much of a change agent Twit­ter must really be if State is doing interventions.

I won­der if there may very well be Gov­ern­ment and Home­land Secu­rity inter­est in the well­ness and pros­per­ity and success.

How­ever, don’t even quote me as say­ing that Twit­ter is too big to fail, but I have never seen any­thing with this level of ubiquity.

Sure, Twit­ter could very well — surely — fly high and then crash. Who knows. I don’t think so. Thou­sands of com­pa­nies have invested big bucks, big resources, and a lot of “face” into Twit­ter — and I have invested over 18,000 tweets into Twitter.

I per­son­ally have a lot invested in Twit­ter. How about you?

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By Spar­tanic | lon­don, NY June 27, 2009 01:24:49 pm:

This is a short sighted and ill informed arti­cle. So you are say­ing twit­ter is a sucess? How on – what basis, that lots of peo­ple use it?Whats the usual mea­sure of suc­cess? – the bot­tom line… How much money does twit­ter make? $0 – Sec­ond life is a mon­e­tised and prof­itable product.

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By chrisabra­ham | Berlin June 27, 2009 06:36:03 pm:

@Spartanic I would say that obsess­ing about “bot­tom line” is the kind of short-sightedness that got us (all — even the Brits) into this finan­cial mess. Twit­ter is dom­i­nat­ing a space that is actu­ally a mad land-grab rush (you might not aware of it because Face­book, MySpace, and Twit­ter are so far about every­one else) and it is essen­tial not to spook any­one off… espe­cially the ear­lier adopters who are look­ing to diss any­thing that “sells out” — and, when it hearty com­pe­ti­tion with Face­book, it is essen­tial to make cer­tain that this “new” — 2007? — tool wins the race.

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By Spar­tanic | lon­don, NY June 28, 2009 01:46:25 pm:

I’m a big fan of Twit­ter don’t get me wrong. I just think its a bit wrong to take pop shots at ‘unfash­ion­able’ plat­forms such as SL because they are not the flavour of the month.The end of the day these ser­vices are a busi­ness model – and so far twit­ter only exists because some­one is pay­ing its bills (i’d hate to think about their host­ing costs). If its try­ing to “win the race” as you say – when is the pay­out day for the investor? Twit­ter seems very reluc­tant to find a way to mon­e­tise – Either because they think it might put peo­ple off – or they cant think of an effec­tive way to get peo­ple to pay.

“This finan­cial mess” as you put it, I fear comes from the whole atti­tude of throw­ing money at some­thing in the hope that some big­ger fish will buy them off – rather than build­ing a strat­egy that will profit enough to pay the run­ning costs (at min­i­mum). The bot­tom line isn’t short sight­ed­ness – its a reality.

If Twit­ter does have a strat­egy and is hold­ing back – all well and good. But I wouldn’t start throw­ing around claims its a suc­cess over an already prof­itable com­pany just yet.

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By chrisabra­ham | Berlin June 28, 2009 02:45:28 pm:

I don’t think I come across as anti-SL, I just wanted to explain why I believe Sec­ond Life failed (did it fail? I don’t hear much about it at all) — my only rea­son for writ­ing this arti­cle is to say that Twit­ter will con­tinue expand­ing because it is per­ma­nent and not ephemeral, it is free and not cost-dependent (you stop pay­ing in SL, you lose your dream house), it is open sys­tem and not a pro­pri­etary walled vil­lage (Google is not allowed into Sec­ond Life and even if it were, there is really no there there to index), and finally, Twit­ter has gone a lot fur­ther down the road towards mak­ing Twit­ter into a house­hold name — even if it doesn’t actu­ally have as much reg­is­tra­tion pen­e­tra­tion as does Facebook.Twitter knows — and their investors know — that the Twit­terati will bail to Friend­Feed, to Plurk, and to Laconi.ca the moment that Twit­ter start heav­ily mon­e­ti­za­tion. Good tim­ing is essen­tial here and I think Twit­ter will focus, at first, on mak­ing money through B2B licens­ing, through Twit­ter PRO ser­vices (which might charge users money for extra API calls since we are only allot­ted 100 calls per/hour, which is a seri­ous impair­ment when you fol­low tens of thou­sands of peo­ple — hell I would pay for more API calls — Twit­ter, hello?).

Any­way, I am com­ing from the assump­tion that Sec­ond Life is a waste­land, the only peo­ple who are really par­tic­i­pat­ing are aca­d­e­mics who are research­ing and shar­ing and edu­cat­ing using Sec­ond Life’s vir­tual world and a small cadre of faith­fuls. I am assum­ing that most brands have aban­doned Sec­ondLife, though I may be mistaken.

I may be wrong, please enlighten me.

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By Spar­tanic | lon­don, NY June 28, 2009 07:19:16 pm:

Well this is where you con­tra­dict your­self. In your open­ing state­ment you are say­ing “ascent and crash of Sec­ond Life”An then in your pre­vi­ous com­ment you say “did it fail? & “I am com­ing from the assump­tion that Sec­ond Life is a waste­land” & I don’t hear much about it at all” – I sug­gest when mak­ing sweep­ing and provoca­tive state­ments you do some research, oth­er­wise some­one might come along and chal­lenge it ;)

You arti­cle talks of “Outlive[ing] the Hype Cycle” – Well sec­ond Life seems to be sur­viv­ing with­out the hype cycle doesn’t it? Believe me I don’t think its per­fect by any means. But its stand­ing on its own two feet which a lot of web com­pa­nies can­not claim.

You say that Twit­ter is open, free and you cant lose your con­tent on it? really? Is this so? – Again – some­one else is bankrolling your con­tent here – if Twit­ter would fold over night – so would all of its con­tent (unless you’ve read it into an exter­nal db of course, have you done that?).

In regard to Google, yes Google does index Sec­ond Life – Google is used for its search engine and also its map­ping sys­tem. that con­tent is just not shown on web search.

I think you are right to say that peo­ple will jump ship if Twit­ter were to start to heav­ily charge for its ser­vices. That’s why I think they may just be wait­ing for some­one like Google to buy them out. Their com­peti­tors have much more func­tion­al­ity, all they don’t have is the brand recog­ni­tion. That’s hardly a recipe for out­last­ing the Hype Cycle either is it? Twit­ter has trou­ble meet­ing the load as it is, let alone with more functionality.

I agree that the nature of Twit­ter would make it eas­ier to sur­vive in the­ory. Text mes­sages are a lot sim­pler to deal with than a com­plex per­sis­tent 3d envi­ron­ment. But, like I was say­ing – if it can’t sus­tain itself then it its not really going to live much past the free lunch.

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By Proko­fyNeva | Sec­ond Life, NY June 28, 2009 08:16:20 pm:

Chris, your over-exaggeration of Twit­ter and bang­ing on Sec­ond Life is typ­i­cal of what I would call a tech­no­com­mu­nist world view that abhors free enter­prise — except for your­self and your ide­o­log­i­cally approved cronies of the left. You betray your hand by prais­ing IRC. Twit­ter is pro­pri­etary soft­ware just as much as Sec­ond Life is — Twit­ter is a “walled gar­den” too. The pres­ence of APIs have made it use­ful for power usages and auto­matic fol­low­ing and search­ing, but SL is a freemium ser­vice with very low bar­ri­ers to entre­pre­neurism — and that’s a good thing (not just for you). Your strange belief that SL is marred by “gree­dy­ness and avarice” (I guess that’s what you call “cap­i­tal­ism” and “com­merce” prac­ticed by peo­ple other than the heads of new dig­i­tal social media ad firms lol) while Twit­ter is sanc­ti­fied by its API­ness is just plain ridiculous.Most Twit­ter APIs are used by SEO and new media gurus in all kinds of money-making schemes of what many see as the most shoddy and greedy kind (just look on Twit­ter and who uses it for God’s sake), and the really major power usage of Twit­ter is by firms that want to scrape the data to sell ads or sell com­mer­cial infor­ma­tion about users for com­mer­cial pur­poses. *And that’s ok*. Isn’t that what YOU do?

Why would some­body putting up a com­mer­cial island for a cam­paign or a long-time cus­tomer rela­tions pres­ence in SL be “greedy” and some­one scrap­ing all the data of track­ing trends for com­mer­cial pur­poses be blessed as “cool”? Makes no sense. Dif­fer­ent tools for dif­fer­ent pur­poses and outcomes.

Try­ing to com­pare Twit­ter with its mas­sive num­bers of users and Sec­ond Life with its small num­ber of users is like com­plain­ing that CNN has a lot of users and the New Yorker only has a small num­ber of sub­scribers. They are dif­fer­ent forms of media, used dif­fer­ently and one need not can­cel out the other.

Your take on SL seems to have evolved mainly through its hyp­ing by a few of the very ad agen­cies that prop up this very site here storm­ing on the scene in 2007 and decid­ing, at a time when they were hugely ner­vous and scared over huge amounts of loss of ad rev­enue from dying news­pa­pers, that per­haps vir­tual worlds and games were the “next big thing”. They were too early and too clue­less with this, but that’s a func­tion of their expec­ta­tions. These same ad com­pa­nies have got­ten no more ROI from Twit­ter than they’ve got­ten out of SL (Skit­tles, anyone?)SL is good for a deeper, more inten­sive pur­pose, for meet­ings and rais­ing of aware­ness and sup­port — really build­ing com­mu­ni­ties; and also for small busi­ness inworld.

SL offers you that more inten­sive inter­ac­tion that is essen­tially a replace­ment for f2f meet­ings because you are in an immer­sive envi­ron­ment and able to reach peo­ple at an intel­lec­tual and emo­tional level, with real-time inter­ac­tive 3-D com­mu­ni­ca­tion, that you just can’t reach with a 140 tweet. Serendip­ity rules in SL

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By Proko­fyNeva | Sec­ond Life, NY June 28, 2009 08:24:29 pm:

The lease per­sua­sive of your argu­ments is that there is some­thing “ephemeral” about Sec­ond Life and not about Twit­ter. What, you save some­where *inside* the ser­vice of Twit­ter which is, er, “eter­nal” all the thou­sands of updates you’ve made. I have 15,000 updates in two years of tweet­ing and some 1300 fol­low­ers whose updates I fol­low — like…I access this some­where? lol Please. I use search for *real-time* needs, not research as I would Google. In the same way, in five years of SL, I have 25,000 pieces of inven­tory, many of them note­cards from meet­ings, tuto­ri­als, dis­cus­sions, etc. all of which save within that sys­tem (unlike any­thing twit­ter offers). Even if SL were to go down tomor­row, I could still cut and paste out of that appli­ca­tion — I’d be lucky to suc­cess­fully page through all the Twit­ter updates past a few months given its lag and error messages.But the point of social media is not to keep com­mu­ni­ca­tions in some big file — both SL and Twit­ter are on Google, and there are appli­ca­tions such as those your dig­i­tal PR new media firm uses for clients.

Twit­ter is not a place where you can build rela­tion­ships and col­lab­o­rat — it’s a sig­nal pusher with a lot of noise push­ing against it, for life-casting or mind-casting, but lit­tle means of tak­ing it beyond the cur­sory clipped expres­sion except by going into Friend­feed or on Skype or into Sec­ond Life or Meta­place or some other venue for voice or text chat with­out Twit­ter restrictions.

You don’t need to defend Twit­ter by bash­ing on Sec­ond Life. Your assess­ment of SL’s hype cycle is based on super­fi­cial media reports and not research of the sort you wouldn’t accept as true if they were about Twit­ter. Twit­ter is over­hyped and will undergo a crash in old media cov­er­age, too, just like Sec­ond Life. You’re obliv­i­ous to the role that dying old media played in tout­ing both Twit­ter and SL, and tone deaf to the pos­si­bil­i­ties for both Twit­ter and SL *after* the old media hype is over. In fact the two ser­vices are com­ple­men­tary and not contradictory.

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By Proko­fyNeva | Sec­ond Life, NY June 28, 2009 08:43:29 pm:

Jason, how is it that you came to view SL through this cyn­i­cal key­hole? Did you type “sex” or “mall” or “strip­per” or “shop­ping” into a search engine? Is that how you use the Inter­net at large?Or are you say­ing you didn’t even bother to search that one time you came to Sec­ond Life, and just made a lazy click on the old “Pop­u­lar Places”? By pop­u­lar out­cry, that list was removed because it was all gamed by bots and camp­ing (SEO tricks) — there is a more curated and mean­ing­ful list of sug­ges­tions now under Show­case and at many resident-made info­hubs like mine in Ross.

While SL can have a steep learn­ing curve, the very basics — search on top­ics to go to events and places — are just like Google and just as easy to use. Talk­ing to other peo­ple is as easy as it is on Twitter.

If you typed in words like Obama, Iran, non-profit, gov­ern­ment, sci­ence, his­tory, lit­er­a­ture, etc. you might have a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence than vis­it­ing clubs with AFK dancers on sex poles — some­thing that in fact really does make up a small por­tion of Sec­ond Life even if it gets inflated traf­fic from bots like the SEO gurus on Twit­ter now get seem­ingly enor­mous num­bers of fol­low­ers using auto­matic scripts).

You *do* put fil­ters on your email to get rid of the Via­gra ads, right? You can do the same in SL.

In the last few weeks, here are some of the things I’ve done in Sec­ond Life:

o hosted an event to talk to peo­ple around the world who came through serendip­ity — edu­ca­tors, jour­nal­ists, human rights activists, etc. to talk about Iran and the “Twit­ter Rev­o­lu­tion” and talk about ways to be sup­port­ive to democ­racy in Iran.

o fol­lowed a lec­ture by a U.S. gov­ern­ment offi­cial about Obama’s tech­nol­ogy pro­grams and social media strategies

o vis­ited the MacArthur Foundation’s island to learn about their pro­grams fund­ing all kinds of inter­est­ing projects around the world

o vis­ited three amaz­ing art instal­la­tions and dis­cussed with fel­low visitors

o attended 3 live music con­certs by artists with orig­i­nal music

o wrote a 3-D inter­ac­tive sci­ence fic­tion story and inter­acted with other peo­ple in the story to dis­cuss what new tech­nol­ogy will bring to us — and take away from us in the future

o made US $200 from my rentals and con­tent busi­ness above costs to use on real-life bills

What did I do on Twit­ter? I *talked* about the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion but didn’t *do* any­thing about it. I spent an hour try­ing to weed out all the SEO goofs fol­low­ing me to get follow-backs using scripts. I learned about a few inter­est­ing arti­cles — but often the same arti­cles I get pasted to me in numer­ous groups and chats in SL on all dif­fer­ent subjects.

I’m an early adapter of Twit­ter and it’s all good, but a time suck.

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By jason_miletsky | totowa, NJ June 29, 2009 12:02:15 am:

Proko­fyNeva You asked me the fol­low­ing ques­tion: “How is it that you came to view SL through this cyn­i­cal keyhole?…Are you say­ing you didn’t even bother to search that one time you came to Sec­ond Life, and just made a lazy click on the old “Pop­u­lar Places”?Actually, I came to my con­clu­sions based on pretty exten­sive research I did for the col­lege text­book I’ve recently had pub­lished, “Prin­ci­ples of Inter­net Mar­ket­ing” (http://bit.ly/63dB5). In the book, I ded­i­cate a good part of one chap­ter to vir­tual worlds, with a spe­cific focus on SL, includ­ing an inter­view with an orga­ni­za­tion that runs a fairly sig­nif­i­cant island there. While I didn’t edi­to­ri­al­ize in the book, I was able to come to some pretty sound con­clu­sions. If I had any pre­con­ceived notions at all before I first went on SL, they were pos­i­tive – I wanted to like it.

But nei­ther my com­ment nor Chris’ orig­i­nal post were about whether or not we like SL. Like has noth­ing to do with it. It’s about SL’s place in the online uni­verse as a widely used tool for social net­work­ing and/or marketing.

I always find it amus­ing, how­ever, how peo­ple who are so crazed and pas­sion­ate about Sec­ond Life are so inca­pable of see­ing the real­ity behind the busi­ness of the Inter­net. I’m sure you gen­er­ated $200 last week, and have had plenty of con­ver­sa­tions with other peo­ple there. But the fact of the mat­ter is that if it ever reached crit­i­cal mass in terms of a being a viable mar­ket­ing or social net­work­ing vehi­cle, it did so awhile ago and shows lit­tle chance of recap­tur­ing any for­mer glory. If you’d like, I’d be more than happy to spend a few min­utes find­ing links to charts show­ing the sig­nif­i­cant loss of media atten­tion and brand usage over the past year or more.

Fanat­ics, whether their obses­sions be for Star Wars, Star Trek, Sec­ond Life or some­thing else, are wel­comed to have their pas­sion. But don’t let your love of some­thing cloud your abil­ity to see the real­ity behind it.

Jason Milet­sky
CEO, PFS Mar­ketwyse
Author, ‘Per­spec­tives on Mar­ket­ing’ and ‘Per­spec­tives on Branding’

http://www.pfsmarketwyse.com

http://twitter.com/jason_miletsky

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By chrisabra­ham | Berlin June 30, 2009 08:45:38 am:

Wow, this is an awe­some com­ment string! This is 100% why I blog. @ProkofyNeva — this arti­cle is 100% about the Hype sur­round­ing Sec­ond Life back in 2006/2007 and the Hype sur­round­ing Twit­ter in 2009 — and why *I* believe Twit­ter is more sus­tain­able in its Hype than Sec­ond Life. That said, thank you Sec­ond Life denizens for mak­ing this true social media — I might down­load Sec­ond Life again if you’re will­ing, maybe, to give me a proper tour of Sec­ond Life.

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By Gwyneth­Llewe­lyn | Lis­bon June 30, 2009 06:20:17 pm:

Chris, I hardly under­stand why you bother to men­tion Sec­ond Life on your descrip­tion of Twit­ter then — unless, of course, the whole point is to gather the atten­tion of Sec­ond Life users, who are quite keen in fol­low­ing *all* news, bad or good, that men­tion it ;) (A very inter­est­ing effect known by so-called SEO experts who have noticed that any­thing Sec­ond Life-related will gather WAY more atten­tion than… almost any­thing else).I totally agree with your descrip­tion of Twit­ter vs. Facebook/Plurk/others, about the open­ness of Twit­ter and its myr­iad appli­ca­tions, about how it resem­bles IRC, about how peo­ple use it as an “intel­li­gent RSS feed” (I’m cer­tainly one of them!). There is noth­ing to dis­agree with :)

How­ever, I com­pletely fail to under­stand the rela­tion­ship with Sec­ond Life. Twit­ter is owned by a com­pany of geeks that just raised ven­ture cap­i­tal and burn it like crazy keep­ing the servers up, with­out a busi­ness plan, with­out a rev­enue model, and thriv­ing on — num­bers and hype. That, in itself, is noth­ing wrong — after all, all the oth­ers are *exactly like that* (when Face­book burned out all their money in 2007, they invented a fake num­ber for their value and sold a share to Microsoft, which should be enough to keep them going on for a few years more — until they sell another share, and so on). Twit­ter is a cool idea which is sim­ply impos­si­ble to mon­e­tise; like, unfor­tu­nately, almost all Web 2.0 appli­ca­tions out there. One day we’ll look back to them all, after the Web 2.0 bub­ble bursts, and think how we could have done the same mis­take *twice*. But we did :)

Sec­ond Life has noth­ing to do with that. It’s prob­a­bly one of the rarest cases where not only it turns a healthy profit but has already paid its return on invest­ment. Since the “hype years” of 2006/7, Sec­ond Life has grown in all areas — num­ber of users; stick­i­ness (num­ber of hours users spend in-world); and other met­rics which are only rel­e­vant to Sec­ond Life users (land­mass; inter­nal econ­omy; etc.) — up to three to four times *after* the “hype days”, it never grew so fast *after* the media lost inter­est in it. And it still grows — 12–15,000 new users every day. It’s not only a “play­ground for uni­ver­si­ties and research labs” — like the Inter­net over­all, and the World-Wide Web, isn’t seen as a “play­ground for aca­d­e­mics” any more. That doesn’t mean that uni­ver­si­ties aren’t doing incred­i­ble things with Sec­ond Life — but that’s just a very small chunk of what’s being done. Prokofy Neva above gave a lot of good exam­ples. There are more. Far more. And most inter­est­ingly, more and more projects in Sec­ond Life are start­ing *now* with a devel­op­ment time of 2–3 years…

Too closed? Weird that you men­tion that. The Sec­ond Life client is *open source* and there is an open source server solu­tion (think Apache vs. MS IIS). Sec­ond Life can fully com­mu­ni­cate with the out­side world using HTTP/XML-RPC and SMTP…

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By chrisabra­ham | Berlin June 30, 2009 09:05:51 pm:

@GwynethLlewelyn Unless you have not been fol­low­ing the news — or have not read my arti­cle at all — I am com­par­ing hypes: the world was going nuts over Sec­ond Life 2–3-years ago and there are many peo­ple who have been com­par­ing the fickle hype sur­round­ing Sec­ond Life with what they’re antic­i­pat­ing is the writ­ing on the wall for Twit­ter, too: how the mighty will have fallen. So, I wasn’t doing a “com­pare and con­trast: Sec­ond Life and Twit­ter: a study,” I was just say­ing why Twitter’s ascen­sion will not be as tran­sient as Sec­ond Life’s. Does that make sense? Either way, I appre­ci­ate these com­ments some­thing awful!

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How awe­some is that? What a beau­ti­ful thing. I love blog­ging! I heart social media!Chris Abra­ham is co-founder and prin­ci­pal of Abra­ham Har­ri­son LLC, an inter­na­tional con­sult­ing group with spe­cial­ties in online word-of-mouth/conversation mar­ket­ing and online busi­ness & tech­nol­ogy strat­egy advis­ing. See his pro­file, con­tact Chris via email, Twit­ter, or leave a com­ment below.

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