Crunchy Bytes

infoneer-pulse:

How did we misread the future so badly? Mind you, this Second Life hype didn’t involve distant, sci-fi predictions about the future. (“Someday we’ll all commute to the moon using unisex RocketCrocs!”) This was just five years ago. We were just months away from the iPhone.

After enduring a lifetime of mega-fads that flame out—the Apple Newton and PointCast and the Segway—why are we so quick to extrapolate a few data points into a Dramatic New Future? Well, here’s the frustrating part: Sometimes the Dramatic New Future arrives, exactly as promised. The mega-hyped Internet? Yep, worked out OK. Ditto Google and Facebook and iPods and iPhones.

This predictive crapshoot is rough on business leaders—your employees are going to bug you, every time, to greenlight the corporate blog. Or the storefront in Second Life. Or the special on Foursquare. Which efforts are worth it? How can you know, for sure, in advance?

» via Slate

Okay, I feel like I need to wade into this one.  A bit of history: I joined SL in 2005 and was a fairly regular user until the earlier part of this year.  While I agree that Second Life has not lived up to the utopian dream it’s founder envisioned (but seriously how many startups fall under that category?) to say it failed is rather ridiculous in my mind.  Secondly, it is fairly disingenuous to use the fact that major corporations had poor luck attracting making money off of the notoriously tech-saavy, counter-cultural demographic which makes up the bulk of SL’s hardcore userbase.  These companies jumped on a fad before understanding the platform or the audience and failed for the same reason that many companies fell flat on their face when social networking first showed up.  To blame the platform, SL in this case, is rather poor reasoning in my opinion. 

Now, to the true genuine problems which are in fact eating SL alive:

1. A piss-poor new user experience.  Aside from the viewer(client software), which I’ll address later,  the experience for a new user was something equivalent to being thrown handcuffed into the deep end of the pool.  So many new concepts were thrown at the user at once with little or no explanation that many users never logged back in after their initial visit.  For those that did make it beyond their first log-in, there was little to no built-in mechanism for allowing the users to make sense of the topsy-turvy do-whatever-the-hell-you-like world that is SL.
2. The viewer is a nightmarish piece of software.  This is especially true for new users. The complaint I have regularly made, and which I will make here again, is that to a new user the viewer is the equivalent of a industrial grade smelter when all they wanted was an EZBake oven.  It is a over-featured, under-designed mess that to new users (especially those who are not in the earlier mentioned tech-savvy crowd) looks like something akin to the worst parts of Microsoft Office and the main dashboard of a Space Shuttle.
3. Linden Labs is mired in a black-hole of being both the platform developer and the service provider.  This means that they cannot focus solely on being either a developer or a service provider, which in turn means that the end result is like the square root of their actual potential in either role.  As a result, the servers are still laggy and crash prone, the graphics technology in the viewer is dated, and the user policies range from head-scratchers to downright insulting.
4. Linden Labs has not turned out to be the champion of the Internet-style Metaverse that it claimed that it wanted to be.  In turn the effort to build a compatible platform has limped along under the dogged effort of a few very committed individuals.
5. The SL model of all-services-under-one-roof is not scalable or sustainable, period.

In short, there’s a myriad of reasons why SL is struggling and may shutter itself.  However it is worth pointing out that SL might in fact be an Edisonian lightbulb, simply a way to learn how not to build a massive user-driven free-form virtual world.

I can rant on about this for some time, but I think I’ll leave it at this.