Second Life’s Early Growth Problems Exacerbated by Rise of Facebook, Ironically Enough (Comment of the Week)

Left to right: Linden Lab’s Robin Harper and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, along with  the CEOs of MySpace and LinkedIn (Commonwealth Club, 2006)

Good point from reader Martin K, adding to Cory Ondrejka’s analysis of why Second Life hit a growth plateau during the peak of media attention between 2006-2008:

The other trend that SecondLife was facing around 2007 was Facebook on PC (and social media in general). If you look at google trends for “SecondLife” and “Facebook” in the years 2006 to 2008, Second Life’s peak in 2007 is dwarfed by Facebook: (Remove “Facebook” from the search to see that the time range actually includes Second Life’s peak.)

Instead of a virtual community of strangers, Facebook was offering a connection with your real-life friends, relatives, and their lives. Compared with that, Second Life wasn’t standing a chance. I can’t help but thinking that there is a lesson to learn for Horizon Worlds and other metaverse apps.

This is true. I recall how much excitement Facebook generated in its early days. For many people, it was the first time they were in something like a near-real time virtual “space” with others, even though avatars were just thumbnail pics of people they knew IRL.

Which also brings us to a Monday Memory: Back in 2006, Second Life was generally considered to be the future of socialization online. To the point where a Linden Lab VP shared a stage at a San Francisco Commonwealth Club forum on the topic, “Online Personas: Defining the Self in a Virtual World”, with some college kid named Zuckerberg:

[This is] from 2006 at the prestigious Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, featuring Robin Harper (then Linden Lab’s Community VP) on the same panel with Mark Zuckerberg — who at the time, was all of 21. (Joined by heads of LinkedIn and MySpace.) Notably, Robin is introduced first, way before that Zuckerberg kid, and the moderator’s first question, along with the talk’s general framing, assumes that it will be virtual worlds which will define the future social network experience. The panelists are asked who they’d like to be in a virtual world; Zuckerberg hesitates to answer, and then gamely agrees that being Cher might be fun.

We all know the turnaround which happened since then:

Cory would go on to become a VP at Facebook, help put together the acquisition of Oculus VR.

Facebook itself would try to create its version of the Metaverse.

And just last Friday on the Wall Street Journal, the latest reported turnaround:

“The number of Horizon users online at the same time, known as concurrency, trails far behind both the socially focused upstart VRChat and Second Life , the pioneering cyberworld that was launched in 2003, said people familiar with the matter.”

Cyberworld! Read the whole thing here (if you have a WSJ account).