Virtual Communities

In the article "Life beyond Second Life" from June of 2007 seemed to be at high point of virtual world in the news. While they have remained very popular I have been hearing less about them than I was two years ago. A lot of this seems to be due to better regulation and rules in the communities that own them. However, according to an article in the Gaurdian this summer, membership in virtual worlds have grown 39% in the second quarter of this year to around 597 million. While experts assume that only a fraction of these member are active at any given time the number are still staggering.

Another surprising fact is that most of this growth came from children. Worlds that target children 5-10 or 10-15 have populations in the tens to hundreds of millions. Worlds targeted to older groups (15-25) have smaller numbers but that thought is that as the youngest users get older they will expect virtual world like online communities and static, text and image based services like Facebook and Myspace won't cut it.

Not only is membership still growing but the companies are profitable. Unlike communites like Twitter or Facebook, the business models of worlds like Second Life or World of Warcraft are based on a mix of payments and subscriptions. Second Life now also offers and enterprise version that allows employees avatars to meet in virtual office spaces. With travel budgets shrinking some companies are embracing this method. Some enterprise users even claim that because the environment can be so engaging it can lead to the creation of more ideas.

So based on all of this do I think that virtual worlds will still be around in 5 or 10 years? Yes, I do. I think that they will continue to change. A lot of the novelty has worn off and I think they they will need to be more accessible to average users than Second Life or other are now to become mainstream. I'm curious to see if the business application really catches on. I think it probably works well for some industries but I can't quite imagine some professions creating an avatar and logging on for a meeting. It will be interesting to see what the 5-15 year-olds of today will grow with and expect from a social network.