In recent months, Second Life has been criticized heavily on several fronts. Most of these criticisms focus on client-side bugs, grid outages and the ever present “griefers.” I began working for AOL at the dawn of time (well, the early 90’s) and watched AOL grow, grow some more, and then grow faster than capacity could be added.
Looking back, the same problems AOL had in the late 90’s, Linden Labs is now having with Second Life. AOL, though a string of blunders, stumbled and lost their edge. Users graduated from AOL to the unwalled frontier of the World Wide Web. Instead of starting up their AOL app, they launched browsers, email clients and instant messenger software - all from competitive vendors.
The landscape is different for Second Life. AOL had competitors. Thousands of ISPs launched in the 90s, all giving users a more robust world than AOL could manage to produce. Second Life has no such competitor. Yes, there are other minor players in the metaverse sector, but none matches Second Life in terms of growth (despite the tech problems) or user experience.
The thing that will secure Second Life in the future is open sourcing their grid software and allowing independent hosts to connect with the SL grid. There are, of course, a host of issues even with that. The SL currency called Lindens being probably the biggest problem related to open source expansion. Until then, watch new accounts to continue to be created and concurrency to continue to grow.
Hand-cream sales will also be on the rise.