Second Life Needs to Stop Having a Separate Life from Other Social Nets
If you're like most people in social media, you don't spend much time anymore thinking about -- let alone playing in -- Second Life, the virtual 3D world that, a few years ago, had "it" social networking status. But with the news on Friday that Mark Kingdon, the current CEO, was stepping down, it's time to think about it again -- and wonder if its reputation for being a geeky hangout for people with no real-world life has proven somehow self-fulfilling.
Other social nets, such as Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare, have a degree of interoperability -- people can broadcast their location using Foursquare, for instance, and also have it sent to their Twitter followers. But not so with Second Life. It has always been disconnected from the more mainstream parts of the social net -- not that it matters, but its Facebook group hasn't even yet posted the fact that Kingdon has left. From a marketing perspective, the thing about the cross-platform nature of other social nets is that they remind users of one platform that those others exist. I may not care particularly that someone I follow on Twitter has just checked in at a local restaurant using Foursquare, but it's a reminder that people I admire are getting enjoyment out of it. Kingdon was well aware of these challenges. At the time of parent Linden Lab's layoff of 30 percent of staff a few weeks ago, he said , "Ultimately, we want to make Second Life more accessible and relevant to a wider population." (The company attributed the layoffs to a refocus on consumers over enterprise users.) Kingdon's plans included making it browser-based so users wouldn't be required to download software, and also coming up with iPhone and iPad versions. As part of managing its way out of the news of the last few weeks, Second Life executives have been releasing stats that show positive momentum for some aspects of the service. Second Life is expected to have record revenue this year and also showed a 30 percent jump in user-to-user virtual transactions, which the company valued at $160 million; repeat log-ins were up 13 percent in March compared to a year ago and Kingdon also said it would probably also have a record number of users by the end of the year. Still, many of those stats suggest a community that's really into Second Life, while the rest of us don't care. If it were experiencing meteoric growth in users, it would be the first to let the world know what those numbers were -- especially to counteract the belief that Second Life was on the wane.
If I were interim CEO Philip Rosedale -- who is also Linden Lab's founder -- I'd get Second Life out of its cocoon as quickly as possible. If it has any chance of relevancy on a broad scale, it's going to do so on the backs of the social networking sites that currently have "it" status.
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