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What happened to Second Life?  The 3-D virtual world from Linden Lab is still very much around but I don’t spend much time there, do you? Second Life has peaked.  And there is something to be learned from this transition.

Facebook is hot right now and Second Life is not, and some of that comes down to the difference between fantasy and reality.  Second Life is a fantasy environment  — an EverQuest without the quest — and that’s the problem.  It has the heavy processing requirements of a game without the rich textural depth of a Tolkein or even of real life.

Facebook, being tied to the real lives of the people involved in it, never runs out of anything, whether it is server power (minimal requirements there. at least in comparison to Second Life) or stuff to talk about.  Second Life is barren in comparison.  By attempting to imitate life, it pales beside the real thing.

Take dancing, for example.  In Second Life dancing performs the social function that in real life is performed by eating.  You can’t eat in Second Life, yet most of the time when people hang out together in real life eating is what they do.  So in Second Life, if they aren’t fighting or making-out, the avatars dance. But it just isn’t very satisfying.

Facebook doesn’t have a dancing/eating problem because it doesn’t purport to be anything like a 3-D virtual world — just a wacked-out representation of our individual lives for the benefit of our friends.

Another problem with Second Life is real estate.  As many companies have done, you can buy 3-D virtual social prominence, whether you deserve it or not.  What Second Life is actually selling isn’t real estate or even server capacity — what they are selling is us, or at least access to us by people who want something.  I don’t like that. Facebook is not immune to this, either, as we see in stories this week about how to buy Facebook friends. But for the most part the way to get lots of friends in Facebook is by being interesting.  Now there’s a concept.

The best purpose I’ve seen for Second Life is for showing videos to your friends.  Everyone meets at a particular spot, watches an mp4 video (thanks to the iPhone nearly every YouTube video is now available in the H.264 mp4 format), commenting back and forth like Mystery Science Theater 3000. But now DeskTube offers a very similar capability with real faces, not avatars, and in Facebook, too.

There’s less and less drawing me to Second Life, though as long as its around I’ll never leave completely.

Where else would I do my 13 hours of aerobics and 90 miles of running per week?

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Just in case you ever sue me, you should know that I have every e-mail I have ever sent or received since 1992. That’s crazy from a legal standpoint, I know, but I can’t help myself. I’m obsessive-compulsive that way. But having a clear view of 16+ years of mail amounting to more than four gigabytes of mainly ascii text gives me a sobering sense of how poorly e-mail does the job lately compared to its glory days of, say, 1999.

More than ninety percent of my mail today by volume is spam. Back in 1999 spam was about 15 percent of my mail. Of course I am in large part to blame for this because I sign up for services and tell them, yes, I would like to receive news and offers by e-mail. I do this because I think it is my job to keep a finger on the pulse of the Internet and if you don’t get spam there isn’t much of a pulse. But it sure gets in the way of staying in touch with friends. And as you can imagine, I have a lot of friends.

As e-mail fails, then, we jump to instant messaging and social networks to take up the slack. Instant-messaging, which remains delightfully spam-free, is also like allowing casual acquaintances easy access to your IV drip: they can drop the worst stuff on you with no notice and no way of avoiding it. At least with e-mail you can decide when to check it or not, but IM is relentlessly in your face.

Well then there are the social networks, right? I tried to avoid these for years. I mean YEARS. People would want me to sign onto one or another so we could “keep our address books synchronized.” Why would I want that? But eventually some of my best friends began to take personally my resistance to being part of their automated lives, so I eventually signed-on to Plaxo, LinkedIn, and FaceBook. I might have a MySpace page, too, I’m not sure, but I certainly don’t visit there.

I barely visit Plaxo, but I am pretty consistently on Facebook and at least once a week get to LinkedIn. But that’s it. As far as I am concerned, if you want me to join Bebo or WhereAreYouNow or some other social networking startup, well forget it. Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Facebook do a perfectly adequate job of defining my culture, thanks. I can’t imagine needing another, especially ones that are so gimmicky. Why the hell, for example, would I want to rate my friends or have them rate me? That’s simply stupid.

There’s my money quote for FriendChat, PeopleRadar, RateMyEverything and a hundred other similar sites: “Rate my friends? That’s stupid” – Bob Cringely.

Keeping up with Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Facebook is bad enough, but I now sense that really ugly things are happening to those platforms making them less and less useful to me. It’s the rise of the social networking application.

You know what I am talking about, those applications that are built by third-party developers to take advantage of the social network ecosystem the companies are so proud to create but we all come to hate over time.

My friend Ira is a Facebook whore. He signs-up for every cause, group, or application sent to him by, well, anybody. Then what’s even worse is he expects me to sign-up too so he can send me whatever crap is the specialty of that subgroup.

I love you, Ira, but I just can’t do as you ask.

This is nothing more than social networking spam, folks, and it is sucking the value out of social networks just like mail spam sucked the value out of e-mail. And to those venture capitalists who see all these applications and rejoice because of the added network volume, which they think translates into higher valuations, understand that this very volume will eventually KILL every one of these companies, making your investment in them worthless.

If you think Facebook is immune to this effect because of its success, you are wrong. It’s very success makes Facebook even more likely to fail as a result. It won’t happen right away but it will happen when we’ll all jump overnight to some other platform whose only advantage over Facebook is that it lacks such sludge.

So if you are in touch with me for any reason please understand that while I will become your friend or contact on these services I will NEVER join a group, NEVER join a cause, NEVER accept an invitation (even if I actually end-up attending the event), NEVER become a fan, and NEVER, NEVER, NEVER install third-party applications.

And you shouldn’t, either.