The Wired Guide to Second Life

With the announcement that Wired and other news organizations will now be reporting from Second Life, they've put up an article on the Wired property and have created a Guide to the larger Second Life world. From the guide: "Today, Second Life is second home to half a million people, and everyone from Duran Duran and Wells Fargo Bank to the Department of Homeland Security has funded real estate here. The national currency of Linden dollars is freely convertible to US dollars (and the exchange rate is quite favorable at the moment!), and an increasing number of residents are ditching their jobs back on Earth to make their living entirely within Second Life's economy. But this exotic realm can seem bewildering and strange to first-time visitors (affectionately known as "noobs" in the native parlance). Let Wired be your guide."

Whats going on?

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Whats going on with Secondlife lately? They seem to be all over the news. Has "web 2.0" (cough hack) really got the news outlets buzzing this bad?

Not yet there

[Belgand]

I honestly wanted to like Second Life. As a sci-fi fan who's been interested in an alternate reality like this for some time I decided that if people are putting the Matrix together, well, better to get in on the ground floor (which is no longer possible of course... that ship sailed a long time ago). Sadly I found it a bit clunky and awkward. Far moreso than I've experienced with any online games. Over a cable modem I found it incredibly laggy and largely futile to try going anywhere. When you do... well, there's not a lot to do unless you've got cash to spend. In this case that cash comes either from giving Linden cash or making something popular enough that you can sell it. So largely unless you have solid graphics talent or plenty of cash it seems pretty easy to get stuck very early on as prices are well above what you can reasonably hope to afford on the miniscule stipend they give you for free. Sure you can get a crap job there, but honestly it never really seemed to be worth it at this stage of development.

Maybe in the future it'll be worthwhile, but at present I'm staying away until they deliver an experience where I can actually walk down the street without it taking 45 minutes to go half a block because of lag and tons and tons of textures taking forever to load.