SI call Bullshitecond Life, that nefarious den of copyright infringement, nerds having chatsex, and the neverending search for the next trivial public relations opportunity, saw hasn’t-been-hot-for-years musician Ben Folds attend a “launch party” for his new album recently. Almost two dozen people attended. That’s right, two dozen. Just think of the impact! Why, if only half of them buy his album, he’ll have sold twelve albums!

What a joke. I make no secret of the fact that I think Second Life is the single most over-rated virtual world in the history of virtual worlds. It appears to be little more than a constant search for the next press release, presumably in the hopes that the fluffy media attention will someday cause a large, clueless media conglomerate to buy them before it becomes clear to everybody that there is no actual utility in Second Life for anyone who isn’t there for the sake of feeling as if they’re on some sort of cutting edge (or who are among the 10 people or so who manage to make some decent money via the virtual world by selling custom dildos and virtual prostitution services.)

Indeed, Second Life is the Paris Hilton of virtual worlds at this point. It is famous for being famous, and little else. Linden Labs, its creator, likes to constantly trumpet the idea that SL represents new opportunities for real-world companies to make money virtually, but that’s simply a flat-out lie. Watch the video in the article I linked to above. SL’s technology can’t even handle two dozen people in the same location without the avatars skipping and jerking around like bad stop-motion animation. What’s truly unfortunate is that the real-world media is so clueless about virtual worlds that they just eat up Second Life’s PR like whores, never stopping to examine whether “Adidas opening a store in Second Life” actually means a damn thing beyond the initial press release. It doesn’t, and the cost to Adidas (or any other company opening something in Second Life) is so trivial that it’s a fire-and-forget exercise that never has to actually perform, since the press release was the whole point to begin with.

And I swear, if I read one more clueless media outlet claiming that Second Life’s total registrations (just recently crossed 1 milion) represent it’s population, I will…well, I won’t do anything, but damn it, I’ll be annoyed. It’s the equivalent of claiming that the population of Switzerland is the total of every single human being who has ever set foot in it in the history of the world, which is, obviously, utter bullshit. Linden, of course, encourages this sort of nonsense because hey, it makes for yet another press release. (Incidentally, our text MUDs have had more registrations than Second Life. Does that mean we’re bigger than Second Life? I guess so, using Linden logic at least.)

Edit: I’m adding a disclaimer here for the purpose of clarifying what I meant by the world having little utility. I meant utility in the way that Linden trumpets it. Linden seems to focus exclusively on the goings-on of a small minority of its residents when it talks about Second Life. Those residents are usually there for the purpose of making real-world money. The fact is, Linden is just not very good as a platform for enabling revenue generation by anyone but Linden Labs. It is, however, excellent at enabling user self-expression, and I’ve got no issue with recognizing that. (Putting this in a separate post as well.)