Gartner says Second Life hype near peak
By Adam Reuters
SECOND LIFE, Jan 4 (Reuters) - Has the public hype about Second Life reached a peak, with a backlash looming?
Using consulting firm Gartner Group’s Hype Cycle as a yardstick, Kevin Dugan of Strategic Public Relations, Tony Walsh of Clickable Culture and Linda Zimmer of Business Communicators of Second Life debated the issue this week.
The Hype Cycle, used by Gartner to track the adoption of new technologies, has five distinct phases: “Technology Trigger,” “Peak of Inflated Expectations,” “Trough of Disillusionment,” “Slope of Enlightenment,” and “Plateau of Productivity.”
Reuters spoke this week with Gartner analyst Steve Prentice about Second Life’s position on the bumpy road from hype to backlash and beyond. The following is an edited transcript.
Adam Reuters: Where do you think Second Life is on the Hype Cycle?
Steve Prentice: I’d probably say we’re heading toward the peak of the hype cycle but we’re not there yet.
AR: Is there any concrete way to measure Second Life’s position?
SP: We have some sort of quantifiable things we look at, but they’re not going to work that well because we’re not talking about a technology as such.
The hype cycle was really designed to track technologies. These sorts of areas (like Second Life) are not so much technology as expressions of the way technology is used. To a large extent the technologies inside Second Life are pretty well established.
I would expect to see it follow a similar sort of hype and depression, if not boom and bust.
AR: What happens when Second Life begins to fall from the peak of expectations described in the Hype Cycle?
SP: We will see a level of disillusionment, caused partially by difficult of scaling the infrastructure to cope with new people, partially by a sense of dissatisfaction as the perceived level of reality falls behind that which is becoming the norm in the home entertainment environment.
Also, it’s interesting to me because I trained as a biologist. I’ve been seeing all the sort of behavioral, societal problems that I’d expect to see on an isolated Pacific island as populations grow. You’ve got social disruption, crime, a whole range of social positioning — that’s just a society growing up.
It’s natural but it is going to cause some disruption and issues over the next year or so as it works through the system.
AR: Do you think SL will eventually emerge from the backlash?
SP: Once you get past the backlash, things will come together. Technology problems will get resolved, expectations will become more realistic as people understand what it’s good for, and you get up to what we call the plateau of productivity, which is essentially maturity.
Another way of looking at the hype cycle is the level of risk involved in diving in. In the early days, there’s a high level of risk, because many things go into the hype cycle and never come out. They dive down into the trough and disappear — I don’t believe that’s going to happen with SL by any means.
AR: What about the future for Linden Lab as an independent company?
SP: It would seem that if YouTube is a target for acquisition, then so potentially must be Second Life. Particularly by someone with the server capacity and the ability to handle that sort of massive parallel processing.
AR: Wouldn’t Google be an obvious choice?
SP: Google would be top of the tree. Microsoft, they have the server farm capabilities, but it would not surprise me to see Google doing something like that.
