So, 150+ posts later, how did my
predictions for 2009 work out?
- Concurrency to reach 100k. It peaked at about 90k and is now in a slow decline. 1/3 to be generous. If it was still rising I might have gone to 2/3.
- Second Life will not get a serious competitor. Seems to be completely true. Metaplace is dead or rather will die tomorrow. Blue Mars is not competing for the educator market as yet and still requires an obscenely high-powered gaming Windoze machine to even get in. Various OpenSim grids seem to be doing OK but others have crashed and burnt too. 3/3
- Alternative viewers will take over. The evidence here is mixed and confused. LL says "alternative viewers are a small proportion" and yet when I downloaded the latest Mac version of Emerald there had already been over 8,000 downloads of it and today, across all platforms there have been about 30k downloads. Given there are fewer than 90k people online at any time, that's a reasonable proportion of folks, but probably not over 50% all told. 2/3 still - 3rd party viewers are big news.
- M Linden will produce better targets and less sermons. Um, sort of. The first part was occasionally true. The second part has become more true unless they've stopped feeding his comments to my RSS feeds. 2/3 for a decent try for the wrong reasons.
- More initial Lindens and one of the big ones to go. Oops. 0/3
- Educators to flirt but expand in SL. OK, this one was pretty much guaranteed but is still true. Most people in OpenSim are in SL too and more new people are coming into SL. Some are leaving, but not that many. 3/3
- Big business will return. Largely Yes and little bit of No here. There are a lot of big businesses around and many are making a success of Second Life once they've thought about how to use it. But Second Life isn't really a great fit for a lot of businesses still - they still seem to mostly think SL should be used like the internet for advertising and the successful businesses don't use it that way. 3/3 still - it is true.
- Teen grid to crack into main grid. Um no. But with the Adult continent we're actually seeing moves that could make it possible in future. I was generous before so I'll be harsh this time. 0/3
- Cory or Phillip to be back. No. Not even close. Cory is happy elsewhere and Phillip is still associated but seemingly even more tenuously. 0/3
- SL to be more widely used for meetings and to beat the credit crunch. Yes, not universally but by many groups including some that you might not have guessed at upfront. 2/3
Total: 17/30 or 56.7%. Appreciably worse than last year (19/30) but at least I was mostly correctly around the use of SL by educators and businesses.
