Two years ago, everyone was buzzing about Second Life, the online virtual reality community that looks like a game but feels like an experiment in alternative realities. While it initially attracted the role-playing fantasy crowd, everyone started to notice when companies like IBM established a presence in Second Life. For some it offered a more immersive type of web conference. For others it was a way to get away with playing a game while pretending to work.

Second Life now appears to be on the back burner for all but the most dedicated fans in the USA with virtually zero growth in traffic over the past 18 months as attention has shifted to Facebook and Twitter. Internationally, however, there has been a noticeable increase in traffic following a surge in mid-November 2008 that came to be known as the Copybot Controversy. In the aftermath, Second Life realized an increase of about 25% in European and other international markets.

The trouble with Second Life is that it is simply too complex to be instantly addictive to a massive number of people. Unlike Twitter, where the barrier to entry is toe-stubblingly low, Second Life requires a substantial commitment of time to learn how to do the simplest things like walk in a straight line. One wrong keystroke and you’re suddenly, albeit harmlessly, flying into space. More than half of the people who give Second Life a shot don’t get serious with it. On the other hand, just 3% of their members account for half of the visits to the site. It’s the addictive nature of social interplay that accounts for a huge amount of time spent by a very small number of people.

But to pass Second Life off as a trivial pursuit to completely miss the mark. Second Lifers are showing us a very crude view into the future, much the way HTML in 1992 gave us a crude preface to today’s web. Merge Google Earth with Second Life and Amazon.com and jump forward another decade or two in raw processing power and you will start to see that a completely immersive virtual reality is indeed possible with full support for retail commerce. The kinks will get ironed out, and when keyboards are replaced with accelerometer-embedded jumpsuits, we’ll be able to interact with the virtual world in ways that are presently difficult to imagine without smirking.

For now, it’s better to leave Second Life to the role players who get their kicks out of creating avatars and mingling with virtual characters. The audience is too small for an extensive marketing program, reaching about 45,000 US visitors each day and a little more than 100,000 daily visitors worldwide. That’s equivalent to the circulation of a small to medium-sized daily newspaper. Building a marketing platform inside Second Life is costly and time consuming. There are countless better ways to spend a marketing budget.