socialmedian: The Second Life Hype Has Fizzled

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The Second Life Hype Has Fizzled—Is Twitter Next?

Feb 21, 2009

Summary

Second Life is still a vibrant virtual world—with over 12.2 million registered users and more than 54,000 online the last time I logged in—but you wouldn’t know it from the media coverage (or lack thereof) lately. It wasn’t always this way, as MediaShift’s Mark Glaser recounts, in a post covering how Second Life’s media hype has fizzled.

At its peak in 2006, Second Life had a story on the cover of Business Week, a 12-page spread in Wired, and numerous blog posts about brands like Coca-Cola, Scion and even the NBA establishing in-world presences. Reuters, CNET, CNN and Wired also set up virtual news bureaus, though all but CNN killed off their in-world coverage about a year later; their stories also shifted from paens to diatribes about how advertisers were “wasting millions” in the virtual world. “It was a typical hype-and-backlash scenario,” Glaser writes. “Some journalists simply ti

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