Google Searches For Second Life: Now More Than Google's Lively (But Less Than WoW)

Barchan Paderborn of SurfWatch pointed me to this cool utility:  Google Insights, which aggregates total Google searches around a particular term.   If you do an Insight on "Second Life", for example, you see a marked decrease in searches from its high point from the middle of 2006 to 2007, though current search volume has not fallen below 2006 levels.  More interesting to me is an Insight tracking searches of "Second Life" in comparison to "World of Warcraft" and Google's new virtual world "Lively", pictured above.  For about three months in 2006, "Second Life" was more popular as a search term than the name of Blizzard/Vivendi's MMORPG giant, then falls back considerably.  "Lively", by contrast, spiked to record levels last July, but a month later, has already plummeted below "Second Life"-- more confirmation of a movement evidenced by Alexa and Google Trends.

Listed according to region, "Second Life" remains a hot search term in Brazil-- a result that's no surprise to me-- followed by Portugal, Italy, France, and Spain.  (Maybe the metaverse could offer a second life to Esperanto?)

Comments

[Pavig Lok]

It's worth also tracking IMVU, which shares the same target market as lively, and coincidentally now about the same search traffic. Search doesn't mean use though, and from my counts lively usage has dropped significantly in the last month post the launch peak.

I've been doing some (completely non empirical) counting of lively rooms since the launch. I hit it at peak times and have a look how they're going. My figures are patently wrong, but anecdotaly probably show a trend.

day two: 45 rooms have a crowd, 55 rooms have a duo, 1980 rooms have a lonely av, and 1480 rooms are empty

day ten: 39 rooms have a crowd, 36 rooms have a duo - the rest campers or empty

yesterday: 26 rooms have a crowd, 22 rooms with a duo, rest campers or empty.

You need more than one av for communication, so in that time we have moved from just over 2% of rooms in lively having the possibility of active communication/engagement going on to under 1%.

Clearly lively has a long way to go if they're currently at imvu levels of interest and on the way down. IMVU has not proven to be a SL killer yet, but has had steady growth in interest over the last year. If lively can hold it's own and begin to compete with IMVU it has a future. Either that or it'll have to jump markets before we see an improvement, and that'll only come (most likely) with an update of the tech to make it more attractive to vertical markets.

[Two Worlds]

Lively sparked up for a while in hype, but then fell dramatically.

Second Life will probably never catch up to WoW.

In other news, water is wet. Fire hurts. The principal...likes soda.