Every month the New York Times or some other tech rag writes a piece explaining that the death of Second Life will happen any day now. They tell us the collapse of The Mainland and thousands of private islands will soon cease to exist.
The problem with this is that Linden Labs (the company behind Second Life) continues to dump salt in their wound by remaining successful and profitable. Yes, they are a profitable company in the worst economy since the Great Depression. Users spend more time online per account than other MMOs, new member growth continues to go up and the concurrency (the number of people online at the same time) is higher month after month after month.
We continue to help real world customers move into Second Life – mostly with small private island builds. We aren’t the only one who have noticed things are still good in Second Life. Mitch Wagner comments:
As a journalist and Second Life enthusiast, I’m annoyed by irresponsible articles that take it for granted that the virtual world is dying, or already dead, or a failure. In fact, Second Life is healthy and growing — I say this based on personal experience, and statements made by officials of Linden Lab, the company that created, develops and operates Second Life.
Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon described a couple of the signs of Second Life’s health in an interview Wednesday conducted inworld at Metanomics, an interview program hosted by Cornell University, conducted inside Second Life.
Yeah, the death watch continues on the web… the vultures continue to circle Linden Labs but they are looking a bit thin these days – they just aren’t getting anything to eat. Maybe they should move on to ValleyWag? The corpses there are impressive.
