Second Life (SL) was all the rage since 2005. Since then, it has even been featured in Law & Order and CSI… but where does Second Life stand now? As this msnbc article points out, all new technologies are initially driven by early adopters – but that doesn’t necessarily ensure long term success. With all the initial hype and news reports, many governments and companies jumped on the SL bandwagon investing significant amounts of money into developing their own islands and businesses in the virtual world. Some examples include: Vodafone, SAP Network, Pontiac, Reebok, Mercedes, Dell, Herman Miller… and the list goes on. However, it seems that at the end of the day, SL hasn’t lived up to expectations.

Even Robert Scoble cited SL as a ‘cooling technology’ in an interview with Shel Israel for the SAP Global Survey. In a previous blog post written by New Paradigm colleague Dan Herman, when you compare usage rates and active members, those of SL pale in comparison to social networking sites like Facebook. For example, SL users make up 0.05% of the total US population compared to Facebook users that make up 7% of the total population in the US or 22% in Canada.

Why didn’t SL live up to its great expectations? As the msn article points out, early adopters aren’t turned off by the kinks and faults of a new technology – rather they care more about being one of the first and many of them enjoy the challenge and are willing to pay a premium (in whatever form that may be). For the regular consumer though, the ultimate purpose SL serves is still unclear and on top of that, it’s pretty difficult to use.