For A Failed Technology Second Life Is Going Strong

After a thrilling evening of marvellous total football at Villa Park, where the mighty Villa demolished Reading 1-0 thanks to a superb header from Christian Benteke, I come home to find that some people seem to think Second Life has failed!

There are those who have been writing off Second Life for years, however it’s still here and whilst Tyche Shepherd’s super stats do indicate a decline, this week’s showing a loss of twenty five private regions and two Linden regions, there are still over twenty eight thousand regions on the grid.

Whereas some see Linden Lab as moving on, The Guardian listing Linden Lab’s Creatoverse in the twenty best Android apps of last week, including a comment of:

No flying genitals or furry avatars here though: instead it’s an inventive physics toolkit: “Watch your creations bounce, roll, tilt or even accelerate on the screen…”

The simple fact of the matter remains that Second Life is Linden Lab’s premier app. Yet despite all evidence to the contrary that Second Life is dead, in an article in The Register regarding ten technology fails, which includes Microsoft Bob, OpenDoc and PDAs, on page four they also list Second Life.

The Register article comments:

Oh, how we were all going to create 3D avatars and use them to live a parallel existence in a virtual world of our own making. Many of us did, of course, but through the likes of World of Warcraft not Second Life, Linden Labs’ mid-2000s attempt to realise William Gibson’s ‘consensual hallucination’ concept of cyberspace – and to make a buck to two into the bargain. Unfortunately, Second Life couldn’t decide if it was a game, an online hang-out or a brand new, 3D paradigm for web-based commerce and services, but for a time, while major corporations that really should have known better were dashing to establish Second Life shopfronts, it didn’t seem to matter. Punters created their avatars and spent real money on virtual cash to spend on expensive plots of unreal land.

And then, of course, they all realised that living one, real life was busy enough. And social networking was born…

I’m constantly bemused as to why people feel Second Life has failed, there is absolutely no evidence to support such claims. I’m not the only one who questions articles such as The Register’s, I actually found The Register article from an article by The Ancient Gaming Noob entitled: Second Life Among Technology Fails? Yes complete with question mark and The Ancient Gaming Noob has never spent much time in Second Life!

I agree with that article, Second Life has not live up to the hype, but what exactly caused the hype in the first place? Linden Lab have only recently started to embrace concepts such as Google Adsense, they certainly weren’t promoting the hell out of Second Life, others did.

Part of the beauty of Second Life is that it’s a constatly evolving plaform, it’s not a one size fits all solution and that remains its major appeal. I’m not going to suggest that Second Life will be here in thirty years time, although I do believe it will be fondly remembered as being ground breaking, but its demise is far from imminent.

Yes there are problems, the tier is too damn high and they should bring back last names! However it’s still a vibrant world, which will soon be unleashed on Steam, apparently. Some people have noticed that a fresh install of the beta viewer provides you with a create account option, which is something people downloading Second Life from Steam will probably appreciate.

There’s plenty of life left in Second Life yet. Now if you want to get your hands on some spiffy protest gnomes, as photographed in my photo at the top of this blog, they are made by Jubjub Forder and are available as a freebie from http://slurl.com/secondlife/VoronezhIrkutsk/215/46/91

The Tier is definitely too damn high!

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