Fallout from the Reuters Abandonment

Beat Writer Bored with Job Takes Aim at Linden Labs

For SLReports.net Sunday FrontPage

Eric Reuters and the Reuters crew have been quit of Second Life for going on two months, but that does not stop secondary coverage of his personal blog post about the closing of the Reuters hub from appearing in such bastions of Journalistic Excellence as Britian's The Register and The Guardian.

Reuters said in his new blog on Silicon Valley Insider, "So what happened? Is Second Life dying? No, but the buzz is gone. For all the sound and fury over recent price hikes and layoffs at Linden Labs, Second Life has a community of fanatically loyal users. Since Linden Lab derives its revenue from user fees, not advertisements, Second Life is much more likely to survive the Web 2.0 shakeout than most other startups.

"It's hard to say what, if anything, Linden Lab can do to make Second Life appeal to a general audience. The very things that most appeal to Second Life's hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let's not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life). As part of walking my "beat," I'd get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I'd right-click the dancefloor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry."

Reuters then outlines a laundry list of ideas that Linden Labs would be keen to at least take note of. Of course, they probably take a lot of notes but use few.