Shannon+Week+6

This is the diffusion process of the Virtual World Second Life. I would rather show the diffusion of Active World since it is the Virtual World that I will be using, but after several hours of researching, I have been unable to obtain the data. I have sent an email to the company and hope they will send me the data for Active World so that I can have that in my final project. This S-curve was created by the CEO of Second Life, Mark Kingdon from the web-site http://gigaom.com/2009/04/15/exclusive-internal-second-life-data-shows-returning-growth/. He created the chart to show that they number of users in virtual worlds are increasing. The numbers are repeat users and not new sign ups. Though this is not the actual Virtual World being utilized, it shows that there is more interest and use of Virtual Worlds. Data on Virtual Worlds is still very broad, and difficult to collect. I believe that this is because it is still in the early emergent stage over all. Most of the users represented on this chart would be innovators, and early adopters, and maybe early majority. The technology is not diffused enough to represent the late majority. This is shown in the numbers. In comparison to other innovations which have users in the billions, Virtual Worlds are still in the thousands. However, I believe that the potential to impact society is just beginning to get recognition. The educational use of this technology could play a major role in the diffusion of this technology.