Retreat: Retiring the Second Strife
Well, it’s been a great run for our ‘Second Strife’ Second Life bashing. It was mostly due to the fact that finding fault with the platform, once touted as the second coming of the Internet, was as easy as gazing dreamily at Sun’s Schwartz’s ponytail (he’s so much more winsome than Scott McNealy - something reflected by Sun’s stock rebound over the past year).
However, Second Life has gone from being irresistibly kick-worthy to downright sad. Roving gangs are obliterating commercial interests. And when industry isn’t under attack its mostly due to the fact that nobody’s there. And that’s when the game is up - something that is happening with increasingly less regularity. Unannounced repairs took the world offline for a large chunk of yesterday leaving Second Life’s sex fiends and furry lovers relying on conventional ‘browser based’ titillation. That update came after another ‘rolling update’ the day prior to address bugs introduced in an earlier release upgrade. The future of e-commerce indeed!
So, its with this ridiculousness in mind that we close the book on our Second Life coverage. The Linden Labs project had promise, an incredible amount of press, and the hopes and dreams of dozens of shut-ins everywhere riding on it. But there comes a point when a company maneuvers itself into irrelevance - and that’s exactly what has become of the platform that we’ve come to love to hate.
Goodbye Second Strife. Hello World.
