Not even a week into 2007 and people are now harshing on Second Life. Valleywag takes some stabs, and Ari Paparo swings with a virtual ten-foot furry dildo:

Quote:

“Second Life is the PointCast of the second bubble. When it implodes (so obvious as to not merit a prediction) everyone will assume that 3D environments do not have a future outside of gaming. 2007 will be a retrenchment year for mainstream 3D environments, with innovation taking a break for a while.”

I won’t disagree with that. Two of my biggest gripes about Second Life are as follows:

1) Usability sucks. There’s a huge learning curve to get anything done in the virtual world. I still haven’t figured out how to design any objects other than a gigantic cylinder and a sphere the size of my head.

2) The numbers are misleading. Second Life has a million plus residents, of which a small percentage are online at any given time. It’s kind of like saying Knott’s Berry Farm has a million residents when most of those people don’t actually spend all their time there and only pop in once in a while to have their kids check out at a guy in a furry suit. I think some clarity on “active user” would be welcome.

All I can say is, when I log into Second Life, I usually see twenty people crowded around a stripper, a gigantic elephant with letters on its body, and some other avatars asleep in a chair trying to scrounge up a handful of Linden dollars. I can get that scene in my local dive bar.

I’ll have to get back in there and take a look around everyone’s favorite digital ghost town. After all, it will be much more fun to experience a technology bust in the virtual world than in the real one.

More information: Terra Nova, BusinessWeek on PointCast

Note: This post has been linked to from Valleywag and Techmeme. I want to add that I have logged into Second Life several times in my efforts to figure out the site: documented here. I feel I’ve put the same amount of effort into Second Life as an average newbie user would.

I’m not totally down on Second Life, but as you might judge from this blog, I haven’t logged in for quite some time - I’m thinking the bloom is fading from this rose, at least as far as I’m concerned.

[tags]Second Life, Vallewag, Technology, Web 2.0[/tags]

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