
Whatever happened to Second Life?  - wglb
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/354457/whatever-happened-to-second-life
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dirtbox
Dead or not, I still seem to make a pretty good amount of money out of it. A
store I made a few years ago still earns me a couple of hundred bucks a week
and I haven't added anything new since the day it went up. Certainly not bad
for a dead project.

I don't use second life anymore, but it seems to me that the truth of the
situation is more to do with it having evolved past the initial stages of
media hype and settled into a stable and diverse online community. I'm waiting
for a what happened to twitter article in another 5 years.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Not so diverse- the article indicates almost all activity is porn. Normally
new media is initially funded by porn (printing, photography, phonograph,
moving pictures, wire recorders, the internet) and evolve into something else.
Second Life has done the opposite. Sounds like a dead end to me.

~~~
danw
Didn't Linden Labs provide a subsidy for Second Life users who built up areas
of the world that attracted lots of users? The idea being to give people
interesting things to do in SL without having to build content themselves.
Inadvertently this created lots of gambling and strip clubs because this was
an easy way of attracting people and earning your subsidy.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
The article seems to indicate it created ONLY strip clubs (gambling being
quashed).

~~~
NikkiA
The subsidy (monthly lot population -> payout/discount) that danw is referring
to happened many years ago now (2005? 2004? earlier?), long before they
outlawed gambling. The lot-use subsidy DID result in a lot of casinos and
'strip clubs', but it also resulted in shops creating community events -
weekly giveaway parties, etc.

While it can be argued that the subsidy resulted in some shady areas of SL, it
should be noted that the massive decline in SL's popularity happened _after_
they were removed, gambling was banned, age verification happened, etc etc. So
it's hardly arguable that the subsidies killed SL.

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ilamont
Deja vu all over again:

What happened to Second Life? (bbc.co.uk)
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=977105>

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dugmartin
You can build your own now with OpenSim:

<http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page>

The interesting part is you can now (sort of) teleport between different
servers taking your identity with you.

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tectonic
A while ago I wrote an artificial life ant simulation in Second Life. I still
think SL has a lot of potential as an educational / collaborative programming
environment.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehEzRUu4_RM>

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zoba
Initially I had my bets on Twitter following a Second Life trend: small
initial adoption, media sensation, explosive growth, People losing interest,
relative obscurity.

I still think it will happen that way, but only when the next big thing comes
along to cover up Twitter, like Twitter covered up Second Life.

~~~
BerislavLopac
I think you're totally right. And I'm building it. :)

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jacquesm
Maybe the people that were there got a real life instead.

March '09 seems to have been their low point, since then they're slowly
growing.

The media hype around second life has caused expectations to be idiotically
high, I remember my bank sending out a press release they'd set up a virtual
office in second life. Totally nuts, since their 'real' online presence is
only a click away at most, and will not have to deal with all kinds of clumsy
virtual world issues.

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maxer
I recently sat through a talk on how second life is being used as a teaching
method in a CS course, its no where near dead, people are finding more ways to
utilise it

SL is the first iteration, there are many new ones coming along soon

~~~
trafficlight
If a college was using Second Life for "teaching", I'd quit then and there.
Have you ever even tried it? The controls are beyond awful.

~~~
Jach
If they did it in place of a real class, I'd quit too. But I'm always open to
a free "Come here if you want to learn X from Professor Zed" so long as "X" is
interesting enough.

Lack of a physical whiteboard might make things tricky though.

~~~
maxer
they showed me a video of how cpu operated.. but they built it using second
life.

It was at a barcamp that i attended.. its not for me but hey, anything that
may get more students on cs courses here cant be a bad thing

