The Tragic Flaw

In another two months, I will mark my third anniversary in Second Life. Reflecting on my experiences over those three years, I wonder how I could have been so far off on my expectations of this wonderful technology. In that time, Second Life has added voice which is good. It has banned gambling which was probably not good as it caused land prices to tank. It is moving adult content to a new continent which is a good idea although handled somewhat poorly. And it has open sourced the technology which is good because it takes control of the technology out of the hands of Linden Labs who do not seem to have the foggiest idea what they are doing and into the hands of people who may know how to exploit it. But, overall, this is meager progress at best.

For their part, Linden Labs has sold a lot of virtual real estate; infuriated a lot of their customers; and dashed the dreams of countless people who saw potential in the technology but failed to achieve that potential for any number of problems most of which can be traced back to poor management on the part of Linden Labs.

Also, during that time, reliability has improved only slightly; lag still persists; inventory still gets lost; and LL seems totally unequal to the task of controlling griefers. In more paranoid moments I have even considered the possibility that the griefers may actually work for Linden Labs. They seem to have free run of the place and perhaps LL sees greifing as a bonding experience for residents. Who knows?

For all my hopes, its seems like the future of Linden Labs is to keep the grid and servers running and to keep adding virtual real estate. All my expectations for future applications in education, commerce, tourism, event management and so on seem to be failing to materialize.

Ignoring the myriad of little problems and attempting to get to the heart of the matter, I realized that the fatal flaw in the Second Life strategy lies in the claim that Second Life is a virtual world created by the residents. This was the BIG mistake. And lest I ramble on too long in this post, I will pick of this thread next time.