“Second Life”, the online virtual community, is experiencing an amazing growth of subscribers, almost doubling every two months. In the beginning of 2006 there were 100,000 subscribers, by October 2006 it reached 1 million and two months later, December 2006 it is about to reach 2 million subscribers. This rate increased dramatically the last two months after increased publicity provided by almost every media available commenting on this new, social and business phenomenon. The blogosphere created a very suitable hyper around a player that become the first millionaire by investing on virtual properties.
Not only the original concept and the subscriber numbers are impressive but the financial transactions taking place every day attract many eyes. More than 10,000 people “live” in the world at any time and they spent 650,000 US dollars every day. Most of the major real life brands have established presence there and those that still do not have presence are moving in soon. These companies hire professional builders for the “Second Life” world and use real life promotions in order to benefit from this, very real, US dollars.
While this niche market looks appealing, many problems come up every day mainly because the creators of Second Life cannot provide the necessary infrastructure in order to keep up with the demand created by the rising number of new subscribers. Linden Lab, the creators and rulers of this world need one server for every 500 subscribers and currently they already have 4,000 servers. Besides the procurement and deployment investment for each server, there are the additional costs of electricity, maintenance and bandwidth without actually providing any new functionality to the end users.
Unfortunately, Linden Lab a company with 100 size employees cannot keep up with this demand of serious and continuous investment, deploying more than 1000 servers a month. As a result new subscribers login into a universe that most of the times is breaking or in the best of the cases, they find it boring and difficult to understand and navigate. All the publicity that Linden Lab has been enjoying hit them back as a boomerang and now they face increased criticism and technical challenges.
Linden Lab is planning to make a series of changes to its operations, mainly adding more personnel in order to assist new users and in the pretty soon, it will offer the software to the open source community. Still, Linden Lab’s ability to scale up its own network is seriously questioned and some believe that their business model is not sustainable.
If you want to find out how this was build and what kind of technical issues it faces, don’t forget to read my “How to build a Second Life universe and make it successful and profitable” recent post.
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