For the last few months we spotted an alarming (and somewhat hilarious) trend among the market research crowd, it seems to be mentioned in every conference. We think it started back in April when someone announced the “potential” that the online game Second Life had for the research and advertising industries. At the time we saw it as anecdotal and found it interesting as a concept - doing “in game” research could work for certain demographics and research topics. We even reported on a similar attempt but with social networking site Habbo.

Researchers and in particular online research companies are more and more worried about how they will engage people in the future. Let us break it to you right now and save you some time… Second Life IS NOT the answer. The explanation is simple:

• This is not where the Internet is going. Online games are a growing category but it’s not where people hang out all day, they are not replacing any of their normal habits for Second Life. In fact, the time they spend in Second Life (or World of Warcraft, which by the way is A LOT more popular than Second Life) is the same time they would spend playing Wii, Xbox or any other videogame.

• Second Life can have millions of registered users (Wikipedia puts it at 9.8 million), although this article puts it much lower but the truth is that nobody knows how many active users they’ve got, even in their own official blog they link to a Google Spreadsheet which states 500,000 active avatars worldwide.

• To put it in much simpler terms, do you know ANYBODY who plays Second Life? We don’t (Tried it and found it incredibly annoying - and here at Livra we are well versed at the art of videogaming:-). Most people we know are in the 25 - 45 age gap. They are all professionals, students, entrepreneurs, housewives, etc from middle to upper income levels. We have never heard anyone talk about it, even mention it. Yes, we know this sample is biased and our methodology non-existent but these remarks are not completely baseless…

• In a Livra Panels survey we just finished in Latin America (full results coming soon), one of the questions asked what kind of activities people do on the Internet (around 60,000 people completed the survey in over 8 countries). In average, 35% said they play online games but this obviously includes EVERYTHING that can be played online… Poker, Scrabble, Chess, World of Warcraft, etc.

• Leaving aside the “how many people actually use it” question, there are many other questions about how truthful people will be when completing surveys or answering questions. Is it them answering or their avatars? An avatar in Second Life is usually nothing to do with their first life counterpart.

So what are you saying? That Second Life doesn’t work for research?

No, we are not really saying that. What we are saying is that this is not the direction the Internet is taking and that the relevance of Second Life in market research is very low. What we are saying is that we should be thinking more about the things that are actually changing people’s lifestyles and communication habits and how we can use those things for research. Unless you haven’t opened a newspaper, magazine, blog, news channel or talked to anyone since 2005 you will find it obvious to discover that the next current big thing is not Second Life. How many people do you know that are on either Facebook, Linkedin, Hi5, MySpace or any other social networking site? How many people you know that use YouTube, Flickr, Twitter/Jaiku, etc? Difficult to think of someone who hasn’t.

Do you see Microsoft and Google slapping each other over acquiring Second Life? No.

We don’t even know why we are still talking about Second Life, people should try this instead.