Wherever people gather there is the chance for humanity to impart itself upon those gathered.

We should expect no less from Second Life.

In a garden pavilion on an island, I sat with an assortment of human beings - one clad as a teddy bear wearing a Santa hat, another as a brazen vixen, a blue man, a tuxedoed prom king - and poured out my heart from a place of loneliness and grief. Click click went the computer keys, like the staccato beat of my heart. Clack clack went their replies, their empathy and their own tales of triumph and woe. Via my avatar - the persona I’d created to engage here - I was participating in an “anxiety support group” in the free, virtual world of Second Life.

As I write those words, I can hear the scoffing. Pathetic! Escapist! Are you addicted to computer games? Do you have no friends? Second Life? That place is just about weird sex fantasies!

I saw my first instance of online group therapy in the form of an email list in the mid-90s. Second Life is no different really, it is just a more immersive experience than email. And that immersion could be the key to better connections and a more expressive group therapy experience. Gone are the vulnerabilities of speaking to strangers in person. Expressing issues is more important I believe than rubbing elbows at the local church.

CNBC ran a story on Second Life and how SL is creating a new economy much in the way eBay has. One woman profiled is on track to make over $80,000 in US dollars this year from the sales of her clothing line in Second Life. Her initial investment was a tad over $500.

The video is worth watching.

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.