Second Life Hype Cycle 2.0

In a great example of blogsourcing, my idea to gauge Second Life against the Gartner Group Hype Cycle is being refined thanks to a post from Linda Zimmer.

Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture updated and improved my initial attempt (shown here) and Electric Sheep's Chris Carella also weighs in on the topic.

I’ve stopped following the Second Life hype months ago...most of our projects to date have been experiments for brands learning about virtual worlds. While we continue to climb the Slope of Enlightenment with our partners, I believe this upcoming year we will begin to showcase the power of virtual worlds and the ways they can build much stronger communities than the web.

In the comments of my initial post, Prokofy Neva notes how the hype cycle might get even more granular in its analysis.

All interesting points to consider.

UPDATE:  Reuters (Second Life) did a quick story on this post before doing a Q&A with a Gartner analyst as follow-up. Check out Gartner says Second Life hype near peak.

tag | Reuters | Gartner Group | Second Life

Comments

[Taran Rampersad]

Counting hammers by counting nails.

[Hiro Pendragon]

Ironically, this whole chart is based off arbitrary, non-quantified values and times, making this chart ...

... pure hype?

Look, the SL numbers - owned land, US$ sold on the Lindex, and concurrent users - speak for themselves. Perhaps some vague notion of the media's love of SL could resemble this proposed graph, but those actually using the technology are finding no shortage of interest of work.

[Hiro Pendragon]

http://secondtense.blogspot.com/2007/01/meta-hype-of-metaverse.html

My reaction. Sorry, this is some major hype.

[Hiro Pendragon]

After some good discussion with a colleague, I have an update:
http://secondtense.blogspot.com/2007/01/meta-hype-of-metaverse-part-2.html

It seems your blog has treated SL as a technology, of which Gartner Hype Cycles deal with. However, Second Life is but one single product in the technology of "Virtual worlds" or "Metaverse", in which using the Hype Cycle, and placing SL in the framework of all the past and present Virtual Worlds, makes much more sense.