New Numbers and New Transparency from Linden Lab/Second Life

TechCrunch has a post about how Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, has taken the transparency of their membership numbers to a whole new level by releasing a detailed burst of data in an Excel spreadsheet. I think this is great - this raises the bar for other online experiences that tout membership or registration numbers.

What kills me though as I read the comments on the TechCrunch post, comments like "I just get so damn bored walking around second life...that needs to change" and "I explored the second life world for a week to try and understand the hype" - is how people that are so tuned into Web 2.0 developments and will drop anything to oggle a new AJAX calendar, can so miss the boat on SL. C'mon, you get bored walking around in SL? Congratulations...I bet you'd get bored walking around in your own neighborhood. DO SOMETHING - life is boring unless you do something - guess what? - so is a virtual life.  And to the rest who don't get the hype, first I'll grant that there is hype clearly but there is also potential.

Do you understand that SL has changed the conversation much like AJAX and Ruby on Rails has? This is not a first-person shooter, this is a development platform. So stop carping about it being boring and create something interesting. It certainly isn't Linden Lab's responsibility to entertain you - that has never been their business model, all they have done is provide a 3D virtual world development platform where the only limitation (outside of number of prims) to what you can create is your own vision.