Second life sucks!

My opinion about Second life

I am not just an Bank account number! Are you?

Linden Labs (owner of Second life) has the best PR department on the planet. They have suckered the press and marketing communities like no one else I have ever seen. That's why people think, Second life is a new 3D web, but in fact Its a private environment, the equivalent of one office building in a city. It keeps trying to protray itself as open and opensource like but the truth is there is one door. A place like second life is too experimental and seemingly open, but essentially you are operating under THEIR umbrella. If you create a 3D world and put it up on your own server space, then you are INDEPENDENT. The web3D needs to focus on bringing 3D directly to the webpage, not to be pushed on individual webpages and by companies who are focusing their virtual worlds efforts to very specific applications.

Second Life bought about a lot of hype and at this point, I think its negative publicity. To the outside, Second Life looks like a place full of freaks, REAL freaks, but in fact the only application second life has perfected is to mirror the worst social vibe of the real world, instead of trying to create an atmosphere which extracts the best dreams from the real world.

I have covered and participated in online communities since 1995. The web was an obvious technology because it was

open,
intuitive and easy to code (HTML),
built on the concept of hyperlinks.

Second Life is "free", but not "open", impenetrable to code, and owned by a single corporation.

The point of virtual reality is to make dreams come true to everyone, not againt only to those, who can buy it. Selling a virtual Island, which is nothing else but few kilobytes of data, for 1000 US$ + 120 US$ months fee is exactly what virtual realitay shouldn't be. And it don't need to be, because there are tools, standards and technical possibilities to build a virtual world without limitations, where one makes his Island, state or planet on his own server or webpage and share it with others for free. We don't need virtual shopping centres, we need virtual reality to spread our fantasy and associate with people from around the world. To make people closer to each other, not to make differences between them, based on the amounts on their bank accounts, even bigger.