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For SLReports.net Sunday FrontPage
Eric Reuters and the Reuters crew have been quit of Second Life for going on two months, but that does not stop secondary coverage of his personal blog post about the closing of the Reuters hub from appearing in such bastions of Journalistic Excellence as Britian's The Register and The Guardian.
Reuters said in his new blog on Silicon Valley Insider, "So what happened? Is Second Life dying? No, but the buzz is gone. For all the sound and fury over recent price hikes and layoffs at Linden Labs, Second Life has a community of fanatically loyal users. Since Linden Lab derives its revenue from user fees, not advertisements, Second Life is much more likely to survive the Web 2.0 shakeout than most other startups.
"It's hard to say what, if anything, Linden Lab can do to make Second Life appeal to a general audience. The very things that most appeal to Second Life's hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let's not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life). As part of walking my "beat," I'd get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I'd right-click the dancefloor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry."
Reuters then outlines a laundry list of ideas that Linden Labs would be keen to at least take note of. Of course, they probably take a lot of notes but use few. - Build good newbie-oriented content. Linden has always taken the position they're in the 3D platform business, and can't be expected to build anything with their own tools or even know what others are doing in Second Life. That argument didn't fly when the gambling scandal broke and it doesn't work now. Second Life has a monster learning curve, and Linden Lab needs to hold new users' hands through every step of their first five or six hours. A big content push isn't even that expensive: the company has proven it can pay Second Lifer's $10/Hr to do these things and have skilled content creators begging for the job.
- Acknowledge that Second Life's reputation is now a liability. This isn't the worst thing in the world, but it does mean Second Life can't sit back and hope word-of-mouth brings in hordes of new users like it did back in 2006. Second Life needs to advertise, and the ads need to be hip. New CEO Mark Kingdon has an ad background and should have the right résumé to pull off a makeover.
- Radically simplify the user interface. The Second Life UI is a mess, and there's been no major changes to it in Second Life's 5+ years. Making the Second Life experience easy-to-use, even graceful, isn't a nice-to-have, it's a business imperative.
- Abandon the idea that Second Life is a business app. I wasn't in Second Life to play, I was there on assignment for Reuters. The login server would crash. I'd try to reach sources, but Second Life's IM window would hang on "waiting" all day when trying to figure out who was online. "Teleports" -- the ability to move from point to point anywhere in Second Life -- would stop working and I'd get locked out of my own office. These weren't one-offs, they were my daily, first-hand, happens-all-the-time experiences. For all its bugs, Second Life is tolerable as a playground, but enterprise users will never and should never use it for business. Re-focus on the core mission: Keeping the hobbyists happy and converting potential recruits into hardcore (read: fees-paying) users.
Reuters then concludes, "None of these things will make Second Life palatable to the general public, but it will draw new traffic and keep a lot more potential users with the right temperment for Second Life from quitting in frustration on their first day. That might be enough for the next year or two.
"There's an incredible depth, passion, and camaraderie to the Second Life community that more popular online experiences like MySpace or World of Warcraft can't match. And while I didn't find it compelling, there really is something awesome about the ability to be able to "buy" a grid of blank 3D space, mold it like clay into an elven forest, a futuristic space station, or a bdsm dungeon, and then invite your friends to hang out."
The Register's Penis Obsession took center-stage in their A+ media-recoverage, with remarks such as "Reports of a marketing evac team swooping in a virtual huey to snatch Eric Reuters from the firm's Sadville bureau - while harried by squadrons of flying penises and pursued by crazed locals bent on acts of bestial sexual brutality - could not be confirmed."
The Register has taken to calling Second Life "Sadville" because obviously any self-loving journalist found working for the shit organization would also have to be "sad", and has been grinding the anti-SL axe for quite some time. While it was The Register writer Chris Williams who claims that "We mostly felt sorry for him" in regards to Eric Reuters assignment to Second Life, let me be the first to go on the record saying that I feel sorry for Chris Williams, whose drival and fiendish sexually deviant writing will find no other home, ever.
The Guardian, in contrast, has taken the editorial slant of allowing their writers to cover Second Life with avowed ignorance of the platform completely, while also allowing them the ability to make sweeping judgements and analysis of the future of Second Life with background expertise such as: "I have never tried Second Life, having decided it was a priori a waste of time based on experiencing World's Away in a previous century. (It was on CompuServe. That dates me.) Maybe IBM plans to sell $60 billion dollars worth of Linux servers on Second Life, or whatever, but I suspect all that had more to do with looking kewl. Now Second Life clearly is not cool, will IBM and any other business users start packing up their pixels ready to depart? If so, how will they explain, in El Reg's words, "why they spent tens of thousands of dollars on the digital equivalent of a wife-swapping party on an oil rig"?"
Clearly, old-bird Jack Schofield, whose decades long experience in journalism include "I have never ever watched American Football but obviously it is the worst sport on the face of the planet and the NFL is doomed to failure" and "I don't care what anyone says, Paul Newman is not a good actor, and I can say this having never watched any of his movies" is just the man to make such poignant remarks part of his volumnuous library of reportage. It is but a pure stamp of excellence when a "news publication" sends it's most ignorant writer on an assignment they have no actual knowledge of or desire to gain knowledge to undertake. Reuters still plans to report on Second Life, "only as part of our usual tech and medial coverage," says a Reuters spokesperson.
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