Second Life Deathwatch?

 

Well, it seems there’s a lot of discussion and speculation about good ol’ SL (still getting into the jargon too much), at the moment.  My post Yesterday got quite few hits, so I looked at some of the search pages that had directed people to my post, and then looked at some of the other search results there.

 

Most of them were serious analyses of SL by much more qualified people than me.  I was just giving my initial observation of SL from a Joe Bloggs (no pun intended), perspective.  But it seems that my initial impression that it could just be a lot of hype over not very much at all may have been right (see this link as an example).  Other sites, blogs and articles though agree that SL is in a transition stage and it remains to be seen where the phenomenon will go from here.

 

The linked post above says that the big corporations, having been attracted to SL by the media hype – are now abandoning the virtual world in their droves.  But some of the comments to the above linked post, dispute that, saying that Fortune 500 companies are queing up to gain an in-world presence.  So it certainly seems that everything is up in the air, and along with everything else to do with the internet nobody really knows what’s going to happen – but love to get their voices heard anyway.

 

In the end none of this really matters to me and most new or prospective users of SL (at least at this stage anyway), but of course if SL is to survive then it needs to get the business aspects and the much vaunted micro-economy of SL, right – in order to be able to develop and attract new customers (that is what they are after all, even though Linden Lab prefer to call them “residents”).  We can only wait and see what happens.  For myself – I will continue to explore Second Life and see what it has to offer.  It is free after all.

 

If the whole thing is managed right, I still think it could have good potential.