Very Interesting article on last Friday's Technology Review by Wade Roush about unrest in Second Life. Large numbers of Second Life residents are signing a petition complaining about perceived bugs, poor performance and lack of responsiveness from the game's creators. The problems seem to be tied to the wild success of the product and the difficulties in scaling the current architecture to meet resident's needs. The amazing thing to me is that there is a whole gosh darn economy being generated by this thing! People can build their own Second Life objects and sell them to each other for real money. I've made a conscious decision not to try it out - I'm what you call an "addictive" personality for these types of things ;-) but I did spend about an hour watching over a friend's shoulder as he tried to get off of orientation island.
The other thing that is amazing to me is how I suspect people's expectations have changed as the Second Life platform has matured and as people have come to view it as more of a business tool than as a crazy cool community of enthusiasts. It will be very interesting to see how Linden Labs negotiates the transformation.
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