Thread by @davekarpf

Today I just want to discuss a mini-throughline in the #WiredArchive.

Let's look at the rise and fall of Second Life, as narrated by @WIRED. (2006-2007).

We can learn a LOT from it.(1/x)

The first piece about @SecondLife appears in October 2006 -- "Wired Travel Guide: Second Life." wired.com/2006/10/slover…
(2/x)

Second Life, at this point, is "the coolest destination on the web." It's growing at 36% per month. It's reminiscent of "The Metaverse" in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

It's basically The Future. (3/x)

Four months later, in February 2007, @WIRED reports on "A Second Life for @MTV." wired.com/2007/02/mtv/

MTV has set up a "virtual Laguna Beach" within Second Life. This was the newest wave of interactive television, and the cutting edge of digital marketing. (4/x)

As an MTV senior VP put it, "Kids were watching Laguna Beach, but then they were going everyplace ese on the Web to talk about what they'd just seen."

(5/x)

...This sets up possibly my favorite quote in the entire #wiredarchive: "With its headlong leap into virtual worlds, MTV hopes to forge MySpace 2.0--and find its way back to the cutting edge."

6/x

Six months later, Frank Rose describes Second Life as a "Lonely Planet."
"Second Life: It's so popular, no one goes there any more. How Madison Avenue is wasting millions of dollars creating ads for an empty digital world."
frankrose.com/lonely-planet.…

(6/x)

Advertisers rushed into Second Life when it was The Future. And then they faded away once it became the present.

(7/x)

But here's where things get interesting: Second Life didn't crash. It didn't disappear.

In 2017, @backchnnl published a fascinating account of a community that was still vibrant within the virtual space: wired.com/2017/02/first-…

(8/x)

If the user numbers in that 2017 article are correct, then Second Life hasn't even shrunk that much! At it's peak, it had 1.1 million users. Today it has between 600,000 and 800,000.

So why do we collectively treat Second Life as a punchline?
Because it stopped being The Future

The Future, from an Internet/Startup/Silicon Valley perspective, is (chronologically) first about *growth* and second about *revenue.*

(10/x)

(This, as an aside, is how Twitter has run into such trouble. The site has massive usage and rakes in a ton of cash. But its user base isn't rapidly growing, so SV treats it as a crisis.)

(11/x)

Growth leads to the advertising boomlet, as advertisers try to be the first to catch The Future. And if/when the advertising goes away, public attention disappears as well. So do the revenue streams that could support further development and capacity-building.

(12/x)

This is basically what Michael Schrage said back in his 1994 @WIRED article, "Is Advertising Dead."

"The future of media is the future of advertising; the future of advertising is the future of media."
wired.com/1994/02/advert…
(13/x)

But the other big takeaway is that *practically nothing ever dies on the Internet.* The companies that stopped being The Future shrink and change, they don't die.
(14/x)

And that's true of so many supposed failures and supposed "disrupted" industries.

The music industry is still here. The New York Times is still here. Broadcast television is still here. Political parties are still here.
(15/x)

The new information monopolies (Google and Facebook) are the companies that managed to capture and keep the advertising dollars.

The discarded companies of The Future mostly still exist. They just dropped out of the headlines as we chased the Next Big Thing. (16/x)

(That's all. Like I said... brief throughline tonight.)
(fin)

(dammit, I screwed up the threading on this tweetstorm again. I do not love Twitter's web interface.)