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Let me start with a clarification because by the nature of my topic this is going to be a critical post.. critical review .. not specific criticism of Second Life (SL) or Linden Lab (LL)..

I am a fan of the technology of Second Life, its potential applications, and have quite a bit of admiration for the talents, efforts, and risk taking being invested into ‘the thing’. I understand this is not quite like anything before it so there are no rules (or immediate solutions to new problems)…so, having said that…

One thing that strikes me at this point in time is there is a lot of ‘Gee-whiz’ coverage and not much dialog about how this ‘thing’ is going to get through its current ‘growing pains’.

As examples of ‘growing pains’ I offer:

• over 190,000 new sign-ups in the last month[1]
• a major security breach of customer data announced 8Sep2006
• an upgrade cycle which severely affected service availability/performance for at least 24 hours - 13/14Sep2006

As a paying customer the last two obviously bother me - I know that it is all ‘acceptable’ under the terms of service (TOS) - but it’s not really acceptable ’service’. OK, lets put that aside, and assume I accept that Second Life is out on the ‘bleeding edge’ and let those go as ‘growing pains’…

As another aside, I’m reminded of the Gartner ‘hype-cycle’ (wikipedia) and wonder if SL is about to enter the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’…

The biggest growing pains, I think, are going to be related to the first issue.

Firstly, as a technologist, it seems to me that growth like this (nearly 30% in a month) is going to be difficult to sustain from an infrastructure point of view. Granted, concurrent logins is likely to be the key factor for technology infrastructure and performance but account growth of 30% in one month, has ‘gotta hurt’ in a ’support’ sense for the organisation. My main feeling here is it’s hard to imagine organisational/infrastructure sustainability with so few paying customers (and I realise that’s a tenuous statement without any ‘hard’ facts to offer but I have been looking at the numbers, as have others).

What is far more difficult to quantify and ’solve’ are the possible ’societal’ (or in SL terms, ‘community’) impacts of such growth. I am not a psychologist or sociologist but it seems to me you don’t have to be to extrapolate potential problems which might arise in the current enviroment.

The opening of totally anonymous accounts in June 2006 is the source of this growth spurt (and from what I can read historically this growth was exactly the goal of that action). It caused a ‘hell of a ruckus‘ (in SL terms) at the time (it was before I even first subscribed to SL incidently and I didn’t learn about it until after I had). I realise I’m late to the discussion. I’m frankly not sure why I’m a bit uncomfortable with ‘totally’ open - but I am now I’ve thought about it - maybe it’s as self-interestedly simple as I feel fully identified and accountable as a ‘paying customer’ and others are not…?

That aside, it seems self evident to me that, without any changes, anarchy will rule in this type of environment eventually. If one accepts that premise, there are a few likely paths to resolve it:

• Linden Lab becomes ‘government’ and enforces ‘community control’, or
• the ‘whole’ Second Life community will ’self-govern’, or
• the ‘community’ actually become ‘a number of self-governing communities’ effectively walled off from each other

It’s reasonably clear the first won’t happen as it is not LL’s intent - I offer Mitch Kapors recent SLCC speech (audio) and a past post by Philip Rosedale in support of my view on this one. In addition, it doesn’t take a ‘rocket scientist’ to figure out that a few dozen LL employees cannot ‘govern’ a community of a few hundred thousand ‘anonymous residents’.

On the second point, I’m sorry but, I offer no more than my opinion that, in a ‘global’ environment like SL, history, and human nature, makes this incredibly unlikely…

So my third suggestion starts to look like the ‘more likely solution’?

And that is really interesting because if you listen to the ‘Gee-whiz’ this thing is about a big, open, global community, sharing… the ‘metaverse’. And to a point I agree - that is one of the enjoyable parts of SL now - a great diversity which you can dip ‘in and out’ of various aspects of. I’m not an artist but I can enjoy the work the artists in SL show us, I’m not terribly into fashion but can appreciate the the stuff designers create, ‘furries’ are fun, music is interesting etc etc. I’m learning, I’m thinking..

Having come this far I now understand a thoughtful comment left by csvenjohnson on a previous post of mine. I’m an ‘old’ technologist but ‘new’ to the ‘metaverse’ - I’m learning, I’m thinking.. - and really appreciate the few voices of ‘critical review’ I can find…

Folks who are looking to the ‘metaverse’ for ’serious’ applications of education, research, simulation, marketing (name your ’serious’ application) are unlikely to accept the ‘anarchy’ that might develop in an ‘anonymous SL’ and therefore ‘walled metaverses’ in SL, or in another technology (as csven suggests), seem to be (at the moment) the likely result.

I will find the reference, and post it here when I do, to a thoughful article I saw recently reflecting on the fact that ’second’ runners (or even third or fourth sometimes) on the Internet are very often the ‘winners’.. take something and do it better than the initial innovator… Google after Alta Vista is an obvious example..

So, my reference to ‘Gee-ker-flop’ is simply meant as a provocative balancing possibility to the ‘Gee-whiz’ we see surrounding this one, commercial, attempt at a ‘metaverse’.

May it succeed, and if it does, it is likely to exist, in my opinion, with any number of other parallel ‘metaverses’.

[1] Second Life statistics history page (15Aug-14Sep)