I think that an half of the people pushing here negative comments didn’t give SL enough attention - I mean that according to what they are saying I think they didn’t stay enough time in-world, or didn’t search enough.
For sure, this could be due to two understandable causes: lacking of time, and poor working of the Search feature of the SL system. Most “Popular Places” (sort of “Top SL sites”, showing up in the Search feature) are really boring, or worst.

Note also that the more people are in the same SL zone, the slower that zone becomes.

About WoW and similars, assuming that SL is competing with them is missing the point. I’m not saying here that it’s better, but SL is not a game - or, if you prefer, SL doesn’t share the same target than Wow and similars.

Oh, last but not least, you really do not need to pay anything to give a full try to Second Life (with a free account you can’t own land, but you can easily earn enough virtual currency to rent a small land for some time).

It is at :
http://www.duvet-dayz.com/archives/2006/12/29/251/

and shows that compared to other SecondLife is very small…

Fully agreed if they don’t get the concurrent user numbers up the hype will collapse sooner or later.

For instance, take the in-world concerts that have taken place in Second Life, such as Suzanne Vega’s. No more than about fifty people can attend one simultaneously, because neither SL’s server nor its client technology can handle it. Just how valuable is it to have 50 people at your concert?

Go look at the corporate installations in Second Life. They’re empty. Toyota, Wells Fargo, etc, get almost zero value aside from a press release for their investment. The only people profiting are Second Life and the hanger-on content creation companies like Electric Sheep and Millions of Us.

And yes, Second Life has released a lot of stats. They’ve very carefully avoided releasing “total active users” as defined by a reasonable metric (non-duplicative accounts that have logged in within the past 2 weeks AND have accumulated more than 3 hours of total in-world time). They avoid releasing this stat, presumably, because it’s not nearly as impressive as trumpeting “3 million registered users,” meaningless though that stat is.

The low (by comparison with claimed) true interest in Second Life can be easily assessed by looking at their simultaneous user count. By comparison, World of Warcraft and Runescape both have a magnitude higher simultaneous user counts for good reasons: They both have far, far, far more real users.
–matt

@ David Mackey: Even i am waiting for it.People get bored of the same thing and its need to freshen up by changing the strategy.

@Randal: The will be an incredible idea of connecting them together.This will not only give a change but also new race of users popping in to create a different enviromnet

It’s been over a year since I put any of my own $USD into Second Life but decided recently I wanted to create a couple new avatars. One of them I told the group during our meeting yesterday I’m going to keep secret and use for investigativ…

There is light at the end of this tunnel - Yoick is working hard on releasing a 3D persistent world platform later this year in which you can have as many of your own worlds as you want with any terrain you want, you can drag and drop any items into your world and share it with others, you can invite a few friends over to watch and chat about a movie or you can hold a virtual concert with many thousands of folk visiting. You’ll never get bored or feel isolated

How do we do this — over three years of smarts in peer to peer and building gaming engines applied into a social media context. Free to use, with premium subs - users get to acquire, make and sell content - think of Skype meets Second Life meets MySpace/Cyworld.

More later…

The other half is a glorified sex chatroom, similar to how Yahoo Chat is. The sex industry is rampant there. So there are many alts running around, seeking cybersex from eachother. How money plays here is through escort services, and user created content that adds towards the sexual experience there. And the creators i gather make some decent money through that in Real Life. If they don’t, then i don’t know why they even bother.

Other than that, that’s all Second Life is. It’s not this Hippy Utopia that Linden Labs makes it out to be.

There’s an interesting artistic side of it that I can appreciate through. Some of the content i find is rather creative.

My computer isn’t shitty, and SL still performs less than acceptably, at least compared to a random smattering of other online and 3d-heavy programs.

So far we’ve seen a lot of designed products (leading to stores, showrooms, and so on). But aside from Slingo, there’s not much in the way of games and interactive activities.

You can dance (pick an option from a menu), watch a movie (sit passively), and chat. Where are the adventure games? The role-playing?

The platform’s there. I think SL has to hire some developers to actually make neat scripted content to showcase what it can do.

And wow > second life in terms of revenue, 6+million subscribers x $15 USD per month is much greater than $670,000 USD per month. Its a testament to just how good Blizzard is by creating virtual ’second lives’ through their games. From Starcraft, especially Diablo II, and now WoW…

If you’ve ever played those games, you’ll see that absurd trend, and just how much bank Vivendi makes.

http://www.getafirstlife.com/

(Not my site, just think it is really funny)