Business Life does Second Life

BA's inflight business magazine.. which means every businessperson who's flown BA in Feb is going to have read this.

No mention of flying willies though.

Comments

[Seb Potter]

And yet there are probably more people in the air on BA planes at any time than there are players logged-in to the grid. Strange how that's so rarely mentioned in the hyperbole-filled articles on this new "phenomenon".

[andyp]

Nicely spotted. We mentioned this on eight bar a couple of weeks back, too - mainly to correct the fact that Roo Reynolds works for IBM, not IMB ;-)

[Tom]

Am I wrong for REALLY disliking Second Life? I gave it a go but after about an hour I realised I would rather be sticking pins in my eyes.

[Alice]

Philip R, the owner, says this:

"The majority of people doesn’t get through the first 4 hour learning curve; but once they’re through, they basically never leave."

I think you can classify yourself as a casualty of the First Four Hours syndrome, as really, do I. Well, that and just no time to noodle around, although I'm dying to see some really extraordinary Metaverse stuff, so I'll get in there properly soon.

[Bigwig]

I've found it really distasteful the way they've continued to inflate their population numbers with big media. 2 million huh? Right.

[kim]

The only thing I admire about SL is that they are super marketeers. One of the other biz mags has them on the cover this month (Inc? Biz 2.0? One of those).

[Cris]

over 3 million last time i looked

how long before someone invents a headline for SL that isn't Virtual Life, Real Money? I've seen 4 or 5 places use that tagline. Yawn.

[Seb Potter]

I suspect there's a lot more real money passing in and out of Sony's Station Exchange for Everquest II http://eq2.stationexchange.com/ than there is in Second Life.

For example, there's currently 1.9 billion linden dollars in the SL economy, which works out to roughly 7 million USD. Divide that up amongst the 21,000 users with "positive monthly linden flow" and you're talking about an average of USD340 existing in the economy as a whole for each player that's making money.

Except, those 21,000 users don't all have an actual positive flow of linden money. More than half have a "positive flow" of less than USD10 per month, which when you factor in subs, upload fees, etc., means that they're probably losing money.

In fact you can see from the published stats that in reality only a few hundred people are really seeing any economic benefit from SL.

Hardly worthy of the press attention it's been getting when you look at the real numbers.

(On a related note, I had an avatar in SL for a couple of months, and still hate it. No 4 hour learning curve here. Philip R's statements basically says "if you gave up on SL it's because you're too stupid to spend 4 hours learning to use it".)

[citizenbay]

I can't help but see SL merely a Virtual Singapore...all squeeky clean yet ultimately lacking soul...