Friday, January 09, 2009

Is Twitter the Next Second Life? - ClickZ

An online friend (ironically met through Twitter) forwarded to me a link to this article, after I had made some online huffings about social media and marketing gurus. Yeah, there are definitely some parallels but I think that the comparison between corporations and their attempted use of Second Life and their use of the social media like Twitter, Facebook, and etc. is really a different animal.

This is probably a topic that's going to be coming up for a while as I define my stances on things. Is this dorky? It's the internet...everything is dorky out there. And thanks, Chandra, for the link.
I'm sorry if I'm about to offend all you dedicated Twitter fanatics out there, but (in the spirit of the holidays) I'm just a big old Scrooge. Articles about Twittering for business make me want to shout 'Bah humbug!' and turn off my computer so I can run screaming into the night.

For the past year or so I've kept silent on this issue, but it now seems like there's an extraordinary parallel between the hype about using Twitter for business and the hype about Second Life and other now-embarrassing fads in the online press.

Remember Second Life? Lots of companies spent big bucks setting up their own islands in the 3-D virtual world so they could do virtual business and rake in the cash. Unfortunately, between protestors who didn't like their chat room sullied with filthy lucre and commercial interests and the sad fact that there's a huge gap between the number of registered users on the site and the number of people who actually use it on a regular basis. Though Second Life seemed like the next big thing, most people who registered for the service used it only once or twice.