Businesses not stampeding from Second Life

While the media focuses on a few high-profile business departures from Second Life, it isn't fair to assume (as many writers have) that businesses are stampeding out of Linden Lab's virtual environment. If anything, business use of Second Life continues to surge, but it isn't the same kind of usage. Indeed, the sort of usage that is in decline is the sort that can barely be called usage at all.

Much of the sort of business usage that you've heard about through the media are self-promotional usages. Sites intended to boost the image of businesses such as Comcast (mistargeted) or Wired (no target) have largely fallen flat. There are more enterprises using Second Life. They're just not the uses that you normally hear about.

The primary business usage of Second Life as it stands today is collaborative usage. These are businesses that aren't issuing press-releases, aren't claiming virtual-environment 'firsts' (falsely or otherwise). They're serious organizations using the virtual environment for their own benefit, on their own schedule and they're not making noise about them.

SME's, universities, colleges, training groups and health-care providers are all deriving benefits from their usage of the virtual environment and few of these successful models rely on drawing the interest of Second Life users at large or drawing large quantities of eyeballs.

The number of educational institutions operating in Second Life is literally countless. It's a mammoth task just trying to total them all up -- and by the time you're done there seem to be more of them than when you started.

The notion that there's some sort of collapse or widespread flight of business and enterprise usage within Second Life (like cockroaches fleeing from bright light) seems to be little more than media fabrication.

Every month we hear from an increasing number of business people in Second Life -- people whose businesses are using the virtual environment to derive direct benefits or figuring out if or how it makes practical sense to use Second Life within their own organizations.

Not all of them will remain, of course. Second Life, as it currently stands does not yet necessarily constitute a useful solution for every organization, but at present it appears that more businesses are coming in than going out.

	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.