Whatever happened to Second Life?

Listening the other day to yet another person tell me how Twitter is the future of communication, I found my eyes glazing over and my thoughts wandering to previous internet phenomena such as Second Life and Friends Reunited. 

Remember Second Life?  The online virtual world where ‘residents’ interact through 3D visual representations of themselves?  Only a year or so ago, companies were opening virtual stores in Second Life, bands were playing virtual gigs and countries were even opening official embassies in this brave new world.

Second Life consultation event

I was working at the Department of Health in November 2007 when we organised a consultative event in Second Life as part of Lord Darzi’s NHS Next Stage Review.  We really believed we were forging the future of engagement by using this virtual world to engage to discuss very real issues.  Although, as some wags pointed out, it made a change from holding virtual consultations in the real world!

But interest in Second Life has waned and while official figures show continued interest, many claim that the reality is a declining user base. 

This week Friends Reunited, the pioneering social networking site that put people in touch with old school friends, also fell back to earth with a bump.  It was sold by ITV for a whopping loss.  Having paid £175m for the site in 2005 – back in the days before we’d even heard of Facebook, let alone starting poking people we don’t like enough to actually talk to – they sold it for £25m.  That’s a loss of £150m.

It is a timely reminder of the extent to which we seem to get swept along in the hype about the latest online application.  So what can it tell us about the future for Twitter?  Well, there is no reason why Twitter has to rise and fall like Second Life and Friends Reunited have done.  Just look at Google for an example of a site that has lived up the hype, and then gone even further.

But these cautionary tales do suggest that the real long term value of these pioneers is not the sites themselves, but in the way they identify and mainstream the possibilities of new media to change the way we communicate. 

So while we may not have all packed in our real lives and moved to Second Life, many more of us are using virtual conferencing technology such as Webex to make our working lives easier.  And although we may no longer be using Friends Reunited to see how our lives panned out compared with those we spent our formative years with, that’s because Facebook allows us to do that in so much more detail and see the photographic evidence too.

So the rise of Twitter doesn’t mean all future communication will be in banal busts of fewer than 140 characters of text speak.  But it does suggest that communications is getting more instantaneous, more immediate, more personal, more tailored.  And we’d better get used to it.