All the Hype of Second Life

I don't think I could've put it more succinctly than this article. Clay Shirky, the author, really puts what the jaded Internet users already know into plain English: Second Life is not a great new frontier, and it isn't introducing new paradigm-altering concepts. In fact, he even cites a quote about LambdaMOO -- a text-based MOO that I still frequent to this day.

Shirky is right and I really wish more people in Second Life would wake up and smell the coffee. Or maybe as an elitist, I actually don't and just say I do so there's something for me to bitch about. Either way, for such a forward-thinking company it just seems totally ass-backwards that Linden Lab is believing its own hype. A cardinal rule in life, as in marketing, is to "know thyself." Like so many other companies out there, they are really failing to grasp this concept and it's ruining their future in the marketplace.

IMO, if Linden Lab really wants to keep Second Life on the up and up; they'll get a clue and start focusing their efforts back on their core-competencies. They'll stop over-marketing and hyping their product and concentrate on making it better than it is now, because it's really starting to fall behind and become stagnant. Just my two-cents.