Geoff Northcott of AKQA in London had a great post in his blog today about Augmented Reality on the Web, which is the term for immersive media experiences.  He matched Second Life and other Augmented Reality technologies against the Gartner Hype Cycle.   The Hype Cycle, pictured above, says that many new technologies on the Internet will go through a cycle—first attracting massive traffic and excitement, then crashing when the technology doesn’t live up to the hype, then slowly recovering as people find the actual, inherent usefulness of the technology.  The entire DotCom bust of 2002 can be seen in the light of this theory.

Here are the five stages of the Hype Cycle, courtesy of Gartner:

1. ”Technology Trigger”
The first phase of a Hype Cycle is the “technology trigger” or breakthrough, product launch or other event that generates significant press and interest.

2. ”Peak of Inflated Expectations”
In the next phase, a frenzy of publicity typically generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. There may be some successful applications of a technology, but there are typically more failures.

3. ”Trough of Disillusionment”
Technologies enter the “trough of disillusionment” because they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Consequently, the press usually abandons the topic and the technology.

4. ”Slope of Enlightenment”
Although the press may have stopped covering the technology, some businesses continue through the “slope of enlightenment” and experiment to understand the benefits and practical application of the technology.

5. ”Plateau of Productivity”
A technology reaches the “plateau of productivity” as the benefits of it become widely demonstrated and accepted. The technology becomes increasingly stable and evolves in second and third generations. The final height of the plateau varies according to whether the technology is broadly applicable or benefits only a niche market.

Clearly this Hype Cycle applies to technologies beyond social media platforms–stuff like RFID and Software-As-A-Service.  But how does it apply to what we think of as social media?

I’m wondering if social media successes like Twitter and Facebook will follow this Hype Cycle or not.  It seems to me that there is a difference between the early success of Facebook and the early success and now possible crash of Second Life.

But a) is there really a difference? and b) will any of them follow the Hype Cycle of boom–bust–success?

Here’s a traffic comparison of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace:

The graph doesn’t do visual justice to the explosion of people coming to Twitter in the last 90 days—the number of registered users has tripled in the first five months of 2009.

MySpace has grown steadily for three years and now is slowly declining, with people “leaking” over to Facebook as their primary social “page.”  LinkedIn has begun a second spurt of growth in the last year as the economy has worsened and more people are tending to their business networks.

None of these patterns matches the boom-bust-success that Second Life finds itself riding.  Other social media that are also riding the Gartner Hype Cycle include Enterprise instant messaging and RSS Feeds.  You can question if these last two examples are even really social media.  They’re technologies that enable a kind of social community.   Having my IM client open all day as well as linked to my smart phone does bring me into a kind of community with people at work.  RSS is a pull technology that I also use to inject comments back into blogs I’m following, as well as forwarding articles on to friends.  So I consider Enterprise IM and RSS to be as much of a social media platform as Second Life.

All of these are technologies that serve as social media platforms for community, and the same could be said about Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

So why do some of these technologies follow the Gartner Hype Cycle and some don’t?  I think the answer is more subtle than we might see at first glance.

All of these examples, both the “hype” social media that crash and burn and the “slow growth” social media, are characteristically the same–they are all technology platforms that host social communities.   They all also share the characteristic of being what I call “charismatic” social media–social media that have some very attractive new quality to them.  Second Life? You get to walk around a virtual 3-D world?  Twitter? You are instantly connected to whomever you want to follow, yammering away from dawn to Midnight.

I think the difference between the “hype cycle” social media and the “slow growth” social media is that while both are “charismatic,” the “hype cycle” social media just aren’t as good or the audience isn’t ready for them.

Second Life isn’t ready for prime time.  Many home computers can’t run Second Life well  (my own laptop keeps crashing when I try to visit my brother’s nightclub there)   but everyone can understand and get use and fun out of Twitter.  Twitter is just better social media than Second Life.  Enterprise IM wasn’t able to get past the security concerns / inertia of in-house IT.  RSS is tied closely to the success of Twitter and blogging, and the easy support available through applications like Google Reader.

My point is that the social media that boom and then bust just aren’t as good, not as ready for prime time, as others.  The great ones scale steadily upward, growing into the millions of users, while the not so good ones fail before they can be re-imagined and re-engineered and/or consumer technology catches up.   Broadband is what made You Tube a social media success and the lack of graphic processing power on most home computers is what makes Second Life a failure.

And meanwhile there is this other category of charismatic social media platforms that are ready for prime time and are succeeding on a massive scale: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

I can imagine two or three years from now the platform we now call Second Life could evolve into a much more malleable, customizable social community that could be made up of hundreds of thousands of “worlds,” all with common operating systems, widgets, rules and behaviors.

Could there still be hope for interactive television yet?

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