The Beeb miss the point

The BBC have an article entitled "What happened to Second Life?" which can be read here. The article is pretty one sided and struggles to come to terms with the fact that Second Life is still thriving, despite the lack of media hype. The Beeb should really hang their head in shame, they couldn't find one independent person singing the praises of Second Life? The only positive part of the article comes from Mark Kingdon, the Beeb really should do better.

The comments section on the article finds Second Life fans, how about that? Amazing, and yet the Beeb chose to cite Adam Pasick (AKA Adam Reuters). They chose to talk of how American Apparel left after a year but fail to mention that IBM are still a strong presence. They manage to find a former user who left after three months but they couldn't find one single long term resident? Please, this is shoddy work from the Beeb.

However there are parts of the article that are interesting, the comments about mobile technology for example. Linden Lab themselves have mentioned how the rise of the laptop was problematic in their development of graphics and that issue isn't going away as people use smaller mobile devices more often.

The learning curve is a problem, many people encounter this issue, others move on. Not being able to find something to do is another issue, which is an area where group limits and the functionality of the event listings come into play. These are all issues but they are not insurmountable and many people master the learning curve, find something to do and enjoy their Second Life experience.

There is one rather humourous comment from someone who complains that you have to pay for everything in Second Life, interesting that he has that impression considering there's a raging debate about freebies!

Linden Lab aren't taking this lying down, indeed they posted a blog post about it, which can be read here. This was posted yesterday with an absolutely mammoth sized picture, fortunately someone has resized it. Now first of all, I do find it rather humourous that the lab are complaining that M was approached to do an interview about "a look at Second Life today - what's it up to, where's it going, why so quiet in the media after such great press a few years ago, etc." I find this humourous because not long back I attended an office hour that was about "Freebies, Demos, and Promo offerings on XStreet" that somehow got morphed into a policy to introduce listing fees for everyone selling an item of L$1 or more on XstreetSL, so providing input on one thing and then discovering that it ends up being about something else is an area where residents have experience, maybe Linden Lab will understand how that's not such a great thing to do to people now, hey?

However the blog post does give an overview of where Second Life is today and rightly points out that businesses are here, education, non profits and fortune 500 companies. The post also points out that more enterprises level solutions are in the offing as well as the new viewer and that Second Life is a platform for individuals as well as business. I hope they mean this as there has been a distinct impression that they are looking to shove out individuals to make way for business, "business friendly mainland" is still causing me concern.

M probably should have mentioned The Open University have a presence in Second Life, the Beeb are very familiar with The Open University and air shows which OU students are encouraged to watch as part of their courses, he could have also name dropped The US Navy, Government involvement, The FBI, yadda yadda yadda. There are a huge amount of use cases for Second Life, something the BBC article doesn't seem to be interested in.

Second Life is going to be around for quite some time and it's still thriving, despite the trials and tribulations some of their decisions bring to residents, it's not going anywhere and is still showing a healthy heartbeat.