If you take a look at Second Life’s blog today (Wednesday, December 6, 2006) you will notice a huge list of problems announced by the company. Last weeks’ software update, that creates the virtual world on users’ computers caused many problems and left users unable to access the system. Obviously, this effects Second Life’s economy and Linden Lab’s future as a viable business.
Banks, universities, retailers, fashion designers, car manufacturers and others have made a great effort and investment in order to establish a presence in this new social network. Linden Lab’s inability to provide stable software, high service availability makes most of these business partners extremely unhappy. Most of the business partners order their own islands and each virtual island is a real life server. Linden Lab is not able to supply all the servers that are on demand and that has created a new market. A good example of how this new market was established is the NBC case: NBC wanted to have several islands but as Linden Lab could not provide the infrastructure that were needed, NBC had to rent the needed land (servers) from the virtual millionaire, property investor Anshe Chung. Even after that, NBC couldn’t reap the benefits of its investment as users could not access it at the launch of the service due to network and software issues.
During the weekend Linden Lab had to disable the search function and the ability to use items from the inventory. Many users also reported wrong amounts appearing in their bank accounts. This caused unhappy faces and concerns for both the creators and the inhabitants of the virtual world.
Such events, forced Linden Lab to publish a new version of the software used by the end users. Still, many problems haven’t been fixed and Linden Lab acknowledges these problems and keeps users informed that they are doing their best to get everything working properly as soon as possible. Everyone is waiting anxiously for stability to be returned in the region but it doesn’t look like it’s going to be any time soon.
Read more on Second Life’s close to collapse status. Find out what it takes to build the Second Life universe.
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