I’ve been wondering about that ever since your Registration Games article. There, you wrote that in a few months SL went from 300k to 600k registrations yet the concurrent users only went from 8k to about 10k (though I recently read that it’s currently more like 9k). That seems like such a very tiny gain for all the stupendous media attention. Wouldn’t something of interest in-and-of-itself, something that would grow regardless of hype, see concurrent usage skyrocket with this kind of attention? I think so.

Maybe the hype is the only thing that keeps SL afloat. Once people stop talking about it I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it dwindled and disappeared.

Second Life has always felt to me to be terribly over hyped. The eHype is way too much at times.

It’s too contrived. There isn’t a lot of stories of “SL is fun because…” but rather “SL can be monetized because…” That’s fine. But I can monetize my backyard or the back of my head for advertising just as easily. The other stories of why SL is unique always end up being self-referential, which is somethings cults do a lot of as well.

SL is not a game because it has no magic circle. No problem there. It can be a fun sandbox. But likewise SL’s marketing has no bounds. All things can be in SL so SL can be all things. All things can be pitched to all people. … ergo, Money Hats. SL might be interesting if the web wasn’t all things already. But SL has no filters so a lot of things I don’t want to see I can’t avoid. And the web for me is still free and unmonopolized. That last bit plus some of the internal workings are why I haven’t invested a lot of time with the Lindens.