Metaverse Consultancy Reports Light Traffic at Real World Company Sites in Second Life and Socialverse
What you're looking at are the Second Life islands hosted by real life corporations which reported the most average visitors last week -- at least according to Metaverse Business, a consultancy which uses bots to gather up user statistics and profile info for its customers. It's possible that there are companies reporting a higher number of visitors than these islands, because the firm scans companies on a list gathered by Tateru Nino for this blog, in 2007. "The list of selected companies is somewhat outdated," Metaverse Business' Louis Platini acknowledges by email. "Not the statistics, they are up-to-date." However, the top two are not surprising: IBM (which has an SL corporate campus) and European telecom Orange (which sponsors an in-world community) are probably the most active corporate presences in SL.
The traffic looks low, but bear in mind these numbers represent each island's weekly average. Total visits on any given week may be considerably more. "[T]here is a large difference between the average number of visitors during a day and the number of unique visitors (during a day/week/month)", Platini tells me. To gather this data, the Metaverse Business bot "bot counts every hour the number of 'green dots' at a number of selected sims/regions. The bot never visits those regions, but retrieves the data from the SL map." So another important data point to consider; I'll be very curious to see data on more recent corporate sites. See the full report here.
Speaking as a cog in a very large Socialverse Appmachine (I work for a large company that shall remain nameless but is not mentioned in this article), I can tell you that the reason these companies don't use their SecondLife sims for business meetings has a lot to do with the fact that us cogs would have to treat it as a public place. Corporate espionage is a very real issue for these companies, and we have strict rules about what we can say and where. If a conversation can be overheard (we're in a café) or if sensitive information can be intercepted (we are using a cell phone), in many cases we are not allowed to share it.
SecondLife has the problem that, even if you have a private sim, you don't really know where IMs, chat text, voice data, or images are going or who might be able to intercept them. All that data would be going outside the company's network and direct control. For some company's (including mine) this is a big no-no.
This is not to say, incidentally, that no one is using SecondLife technologies for business meetings. Some companies may have more relaxed rules than mine does. Also, some companies might be using completely internal Socialverse versions of SecondLife (e.g. Open Simulator installed on internal servers). I'm sure people are experimenting with it. There is a lot of work being done in these big companies around how to get dispersed teams working more effectively. Heck, it's why I started using SecondLife in the first place.
Here's an analogy: if you were to go to my company's head office, you would find a big, pretty meeting room right of the reception foyer. It's got comfy chairs, slick flat panel screens, and wood furnishings. Anybody can walk into it, and it's empty 95% of the time. The real meetings happen behind the locked doors the security guards are watching. Those meeting rooms are cramped, a bit dingy, and 95% of the time they are booked.
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