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Virtual Worlds more popular than Facebook?

In a report from Nielson Games, Second Life is ranked the second Top PC game title in March. Virtual World News points us to this latest report, which looked at a 180,000 homes in the U.S and monitored Web and application activity. World of Warcraft is ranked number one, however, Second Life saw an average use of a 760 minutes per week, higher than the weekly use of World of Warcraft. The obvious problem that all virtual world enthusiasts point out is that Second Life is not a game like WoW. Although one of its many applications can be a game, it is not necessarily a fair comparison. Check out the rankings:

I am a bit surprised by this statistic, but it does reveal the underlying popularity of virtual worlds, which are only on the rise. “Massively points out that the virtual world [Second Life] is also topping out over popular social networks like Facebook and Myspace.” Also noting that “This data is measured from actual homes…Almost 200,000 of them, so it isn’t just data that’s centric to the hardcore gamer. This is a random sampling of ordinary people.” Here is a summary of their analysis:

YouTube: 47 minutes per week (via Cnet)
Facebook: 84 minutes per week (via Cnet)
Myspace: 10.5 minutes per week (via ITProPortal)
Second LIfe: 760 minutes per week (via Nielsen)

These numbers are pretty shocking and show both the popularity and robustness of virtual worlds. Where will they take us? Who knows, but we still need a lot of work on the infrastructure of virtual worlds before they become as ubiquitous as social networks like Facebook and Twitter.