I did not have the impression that there is a lack of imagination in Second Life. That there are lots of boring creations is meaningless, as it does not say anything about the amount of interesting creations.
If there are many crappy things out there and some rare jewels stick out, I think it's justified to say there is an overall lack of imagination.
It's that what many people notice when they visit Second Life the first time. Large abandoned places. Nothing of real interest.
Second Life is missing Google. There is nothing that really helps people to find the good things in Second Life.
I'm sure it was a kind of "google effect" in the old days that showed people what sites on the internet were good and widely accepted, and by that they started to improve their own sites. Maybe if something like that is built, true innovation and improvement will be noticed and more easily adopted by the citizens...
I agree that it is hard to find interesting things in Second Life, especially as the internal search functionality seems to be quite crappy (like so many other aspects of the interface). That doesn't say anything about the creativity going on, though - it only means that the search engine is broken. I tend to read about interesting places in Second Life in blogs. Several web pages try to address the search problem for Second Life, too.
At the times when I was just trying my luck with the internal search engine, I found interesting places, too. Many of them were abandoned, that is true, but that doesn't imply that they were boring.
What would you do as a first time user of the World Wide Web? Would you be able to find interesting web pages right away?
