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BigPond Bails on 2nd Life

November 18, 2009 on 10:34 am | In IdBlog, Tools | Add a Comment

Australian national telco, Telstra, and their ISP, BigPond, have decided to terminate their experiment in Second Life.

Like a lot of other big businesses, BigPond jumped into the virtual world in 2007 when it looked like flying avatars and pixelated real estate might be the Next Big Thing. Or as the Sydney Morning Herald reported, “There is a lot of pressure for organisations to appear innovative and to be seen using the latest web based technology, often adopting it before any real value has been ascertained.”

The true story, however, is in the numbers. BigPond logged 100,000 users  signing up for Second Life through its service over the past two years, but only about 2000 visited Second Life on a regular basis.

This pattern of rapidly increasing enrollments and dwindling usage is typical of social media services and other walled gardens on the internet. Users are attracted to the new service by media hype, cool features and snowballing enrollments, only to find that the club they joined starts to seem sort of limited after awhile.

I was going to use BigPond’s experience with Second Life as an object lesson in the utility of walled gardens on the internet, but Jeff Atwood has already stated the case so well in his essay, Avoiding Walled Gardens on the Internet, that I’ll just link off and call it a day.