Really, 90% of what I saw in Second Life was more easily and better done in City of Heroes, including character design - and you didn't have to pay extra real cash to get decent clothes.

More fundamentally, though, when people were being social in SL, they were standing around and chatting. It doesn't take all the rest to accomplish that.

and flying penis.

http://secondlife.com/statistics/economy-data.php?d=2009-12-...

Although I don't use it any more, the vitriol and scorn that SecondLife engenders amazes me. I've no idea where it comes from. At heart it's basically a huge 3D chat room, albeit a fairly sophisticated one.

I think the vitriol directed at SL is somewhat justified - its creators have cast it as some kind of world-changing social experiment, but in reality it's a glorified 3D chat room. We in the tech community generally dislike this sort of unsubstantiated hype.

What a testament to the exponential growth of things like Facebook and Twitter that an app that has garnered millions upon millions of users in just a few years can be described as "extremely niche" with a straight face.

And though I used to agree with you, I think SL will be remembered as a somewhat paradigm-shifting social experiment, in that it first introduced many people to the idea of virtual worlds, especially in terms of virtual economies where people make real money.

There's a lot of possibility in SL, it's a shame that interacting with it is so clunky and awkward.

OTOH there's WOW, which is better looking and easier to get started in. They're heading for 12-million users, which at $15/month makes SL look like Woolworth's.

But the ability to design objects, do shows et al means that for Maker-types the equal of SL exists nowhere else (that I know of).

Let's just be nice and say SL was a couple decades ahead of its time.

The economy itself chugs along and practically prints money for Linden Labs, as well as the sellers.

They recently started selling servers to private companies as a means of allowing them to bring the control 'in house' instead of being open to the entire Grid.

To be honest, nothing happened to Second Life. It was just forgotten, for awhile, and will inevitably rise again whether it be through extension of this version or the creation of something new, like Blue Mars.

Journalist: "How about this pitch: 'Second Life, where is it now?'"

CoS / Section Editor: "Brilliant. An exploration of how the media jumps on a new technology bandwagon, defines it as essential, assumes it will last forever, and then forgets about it almost immediately. Just be sure to put a link on our Twitter feed when it's done."

I think right when Second Life started to decline, they also had a massive crackdown on gambling in the virtual world. (Before then it had been common place for there to be entire Sims devoted to gambling lindens).

So they killed gambling, so the only things left were shoes and porn.

But gambling had been the really big thing.

When I did second life I found it very difficult to meet anyone who was genuinely interesting. (not that there was no one interesting, just finding them was _hard_).

I spent about ninety minutes on Second Life a couple years ago, back in the days of its hype, and my vivid impression was that it was an urban planner's worst nightmare. Kind of like Phoenix.

Everyone had land -- land was considered important and valuable, right? -- so the world consisted of many separate buildings each alone in the center of its acre of land. But the majority of the buildings were deserted, presumably either because not everyone was online at the same time or because they were all off someplace else. After all, if I wanted to sit around by myself in a house full of rooms that I had carefully customized, why would I have logged into Second Life?

So I wandered around looking for the mall, or the city, or the theme park, or someplace which might actually have some activity. I spent a lot of time traveling around -- all that suburban living makes for long commutes! -- until I finally found a building full of people, but of course they were all robots and when you talked to one they either started to have sex with each other or offered to have sex with you.

Wake me up when they invent a virtual world that's more like Paris than post-apocalyptic Las Vegas.