Second Life reaches 5 million residents

Second Life reaches 5 million residents and a $1.65 million per day economy but its growth rate has slowed from a doubling every two months in both residents and economic activity. The chart below shows the population and economic trends since January 2006.


What is so exciting about Second Life that has attracted 5 million residents? Other statistics not reflected here would probably show more interesting patterns about the medium's usage such as an increase in time spent in-world, a growth in community-specific groups and an increase in corporate presence as more entities set up virtual offices including Coldwell Banker.

Web 3.D is about Community, Community, Community.
The richness of a virtual world platform like Second Life suggests why it is so successful. The Internet was a tremendous step forward as people with shared interests were able to find each other via usenet and email lists, mainly having 1:many relationships. Web 3.D virtual worlds allow special interest interactions to be much deeper and more intimate in a robust audio-visual and 1:1 way instead of a 2D text-based 1:many way.

In addition to more intimate interaction, virtual worlds offer more agency. One example is that people can fully govern how their appearance is presented. Interestingly, so far, instead of exploring more aspects of identity and representation, the vast majority of avatars appear in a great homogeneity of youth and beauty, making explicit the strong force of perceived appearance ideals in the physical world culture and recreating this in virtual reality. Then as art imitates life imitates art, the avatorial aesthetic cycled back out of a Second Life gallery into the physical world in a “13 Most Beautiful Avatars” exhibit at New York’s Rhizome gallery.

The interesting focus for Second Life now is not how many residents are there but the large variety of inventive things that they may be doing.

Our avatars ourselves

As companies and other organizations take to immersive worlds, it may be that new employees are assigned an avatar and virtual office space along with their security card and computer. Blogging is now part of some job descriptions and soon employees may be encouraged to spend time in-world for both corporate socialization and professional collaboration purposes within and across corporate lines.

There is a lot of energy around synthetic environments including a full track of virtual world programming at this week's SXSW Interactive in Austin TX and at the upcoming Virtual Worlds 2007 conference in NY March 28-29. Second Life is sneaking up on 5m users and a $2m/day economy and There engine Forterra has its hands full with enterprise and government clients for custom enterprise applications as well as government and medical simulation and training exercises. If you are not in-world somewhere for your company, you can work as an extra in someone else's world. Sim exercises are populated by "external role players," a new and expanding job category which simultaneously underlines the marketability and necessity of tech-savviness and another step in the Yochai Benkler shift to an economy of distributed individual participants vs. industrialized entities.

Professional avatars will likely be influenced by corporate guidelines and norms regarding appearance and behavior, analogous to the physical world; at least virtual suits are more comfortable! One result of this could be an even more diffuse exploration of virtual identity as humans have a closet full of avatars for all of their different professional and personal virtual activities. Other new job categories are probably already proliferating: avatar imaging, avatar reputation management and consolidation...

Avatar and other content portability across the different emerging public and private virtual world environments is also a non-trivial matter. IEEE avatar translation protocols and standards as well as intra-world authentication services could help facilitate avatar portability. Poor portability could mean poor rendering which could result in miscommunication, prejudice and other dynamics which can be theoretically avoided with virtual worlds. An avatar discrimination lawsuit re: virtual world employment practices would not really be a hoped for milestone.

Life after Second Life

Why be content with Second Life when you can join ...the Multiverse Network... and access and interact in hundreds of virtual worlds all via one portal? Multiverse Network sees itself as the browser of metaverse worlds as users gatewaying through their site will have a universal sign-in, unified billing and centralized marketplace commerce. Interworld communication and travel is planned, as well as social mechanisms for world discovery and collection with personalized "world playlists,” user rankings and contests.

The few hundred development teams in the Multiverse Network's closed beta are finding the virtual world platform to be a unique, fun and high-functionality way to create MMOG worlds. The platform, soon to be in public beta, is being used for traditional game development (Force of Arms) as well as non-gaming work and learning applications (Project Mars which includes Mars-like gravity) and is described in more depth here.

The Multiverse Network's push in releasing worlds to end-user consumers in 2008 will likely trigger a further explosion in synthetic world commerce. One implication is that vendors making avatars, objects, textures, animation scripts, etc. for use in on-line worlds would no longer have to be tied to just one world, as the Electric Sheep Company, SLBoutique and Aimee Weber are to Second Life. Network content developers would have a panoply of potential customers and leveragable products and services.

Interworld connection will allow massive cross-world collaboration networks based on affinities to evolve; what would it be like to be with 1000 avatars online in the same space? While virtual space allows for smaller avatar form factors, communications challenges will likely abound with multi-channel chat streams erupting with some predictable asymptote of crowd participants.

Identity (that temporary and anachronistic human construct) will be different in a multiverse network with larger identity and avatar portfolios to manage (this theme is already occurring in Second Life whose nearly 1 million "residents" correspond to far fewer biological equivalents). Identity experimentation will be fun in multiverse worlds too, such as by being able to be multiple avatars in multiple worlds simultaneously and by permissioning avatars for independent tasks and activities with low-level AI methods.