"Remember Second Life? That Could Be Facebook’s Future" is the title for my recent chat with Bloomberg's Parmy Olson (author of the seminal book, We Are Anonymous). Here's some of my favorite excerpts, along with some reference links where available:
WJA: For any story I’ve seen about the metaverse now, there’s an analogue to what happened in Second Life. This talk of a metaverse real estate boom? Yes, that definitely happened. Talk of big companies opening up virtual headquarters? There were a lot of other Fortune 500 companies that opened up a site in Second Life.
PO: What do you make of the metaverse worlds being created today by Facebook and Microsoft?
WJA: Well, Facebook’s [social virtual-reality app Horizon Venues] is not very impressive so far. And I’ve talked to people who’ve worked on it and there’s apparently a lot of churn, people coming and going. There’s not much design focus. It seems like they’re still struggling to get it into a mass market product. The great irony is that Oculus is selling pretty well, but there are other [social] platforms that are more popular, like Rec Room and VRChat, which have way more active users. VRChat hit almost 90,000 concurrent users on the platform at the same time last New Year, which is getting higher than Second Life...
I know a lot of metaverse evangelists who promote it as the next big thing. But what’s notable is that very few of them actually use the metaverse with the degree of frequency that they say we’re all going to be using it. Using the metaverse takes time — being able to log on and just the amount of focus you have to spend. You have to be very aware of your surroundings in the immersive space, including audio cues. It takes a lot of time and attention...
Still, to me, even if [the metaverse] only becomes a more creative, more democratic alternative to traditional movies, TV and even games, I think that’s a big win for humanity.
Emphasis mine! Parmy and I also got into the weeds about why Second Life failed to go mass market:
PO: Even so, Second Life’s active user numbers never managed to go above 1 million, despite lots of fanfare and publicity. Why did it never achieve the mainstream success so many hoped for?
WJA: Even as Second Life got more and more mainstream [attention], the technology requirements were not mainstream. Then there was the user experience which, even today, looks like it was created by engineers versus designers.
PO: Right, doing simple things like moving around or putting clothes on your avatar could be unwieldy and complicated and required going into the editing function to move things around.
WJA: And yet at the same time, the virtual fashion industry is massive. Even today, there are more content creators in Second Life making $10,000 a year than content creators on [virtual-reality platform] Roblox, even though Roblox Corporation has a much larger user base...
And this all could have been much, much bigger if the creators of Second Life didn’t make some really bad decisions early on. It was intended to be used by hundreds of millions of people and its creators had aspirations to build the metaverse. But Second Life couldn’t run on a laptop. And then there was a shift to smartphones. There is still no official Second Life app, which is just mind-boggling.
Much more here. Parmy and I are also planning to have a Twitter Spaces chat on these topics soon, so stay tuned for that.
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