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Reuters quits Second Life

Second Life was a fashionable virtual destination, and had its own Reuters reporter. Now he's quit, maybe the virtual tide has turned -- at least for business use of the online system

I'm sure you enjoyed reading all those stories about Katie's Kool Kattery etc setting up a virtual business in Second Life. Now you might be in for another round of stories about Katie's Kool Kattery quitting on Second Life. Reuters has just quit, and its reporter has penned an Exclusive: Why Reuters Left Second Life, And How Linden Lab Can Fix It at Silicon Alley Insider:

So what happened? Is Second Life dying? No, but the buzz is gone.

Eric Krangel says his "beat" was "about as fun as watching paint dry." Which sounds like yet another example of hype finally being overtaken by some semblance of reality….

This seems to be a response to a story in The Register, which reports that:

a trawl of the Reuters site reveals Adam [Reuters] last reported on Second Life in April this year, and hasn't worked under the Adam Reuters nom-de-plume since July last year. He was replaced as embed by his brother Eric Reuters, whose real name is unknown. We'll spare him embarrassment by not bothering to find out.

At SAI, Eric Krangel also tells Linden Lab to "Abandon the idea that Second Life is a business app." He says:

I wasn't in Second Life to play, I was there on assignment for Reuters. The login server would crash. I'd try to reach sources, but Second Life's IM window would hang on "waiting" all day when trying to figure out who was online. "Teleports" -- the ability to move from point to point anywhere in Second Life -- would stop working and I'd get locked out of my own office. These weren't one-offs, they were my daily, first-hand, happens-all-the-time experiences. For all its bugs, Second Life is tolerable as a playground, but enterprise users will never and should never use it for business. Re-focus on the core mission: Keeping the hobbyists happy and converting potential recruits into hardcore (read: fees-paying) users.

Of course, Second Life will still be in the news, for at least as long as there are stories like Virtual affair yields real divorce for UK couple and the BBC can provide useful public service articles along the lines of How do avatars have sex?

I have never tried Second Life, having decided it was a priori a waste of time based on experiencing World's Away in a previous century. (It was on CompuServe. That dates me.) Maybe IBM plans to sell $60 billion dollars worth of Linux servers on Second Life, or whatever, but I suspect all that had more to do with looking kewl.

Now Second Life clearly is not cool, will IBM and any other business users start packing up their pixels ready to depart? If so, how will they explain, in El Reg's words, "why they spent tens of thousands of dollars on the digital equivalent of a wife-swapping party on an oil rig"?

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