Launched in 2003, it quickly achieved worldwide success. Equally sudden was the fall into oblivion. Today there are only a few thousand users
In the mid-2000s it was considered the future of the web and interpersonal relationships. Many believed that, together with MySpace, it would revolutionize the way we know people and introduce three-dimensional avatars into our lives. Already in 2009, however, more than someone began to wonder what happened to Second Life.
Although the virtual world created by Liden Lab was at the height of its success (in that year reached the maximum number of users connected simultaneously, 88,200), the level of disaffection was already very high. And despite the various attempts of the software house to relaunch what was its flagship product, the situation has not changed at all. On the contrary: Second Life has fallen definitively (or almost) into oblivion and has no more than 800 thousand registered users.
What happened to Second Life
As you may have guessed, Second Life has not made any "end". That is, it's still alive and well, even if it no longer enjoys the same fame and the same number of users it could count on a decade ago. Unable to stand comparison with social networks such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram born at the same time or a few years later.
And if at the height of its success Second Life was a world teeming with people, businesses and companies (big names in the world of technology, such as IBM, have spent millions and millions of dollars for their presence in Second Life), today the virtual world appears to most as a wasteland and uninhabited, with large portions of the virtual world "colonizable".
Despite this, however, there is still a core of loyal users who have not abandoned their avatars - created perhaps more than 10 years ago - and who use the public spaces of Second Life to meet up with old friends met who knows where and who knows how long ago.
According to what we read online, however, Second Life can also count on a large community that uses the virtual environments for red-light meetings. According to some unofficial statistics, 20% of the surface of Second Life is now used for meetings of this type.