Media: "Philip Rosedale Was Wrong About Second Life"

It has come to our attention that Philip Linden, née Rosedale, has gone on record saying that we, the Media, have it all wrong; that Second Life was not a failure. This is not only demonstrably ludicrous; it is a smear on the good name and reportage that we, The Media, strive to give our collective feed animals viewerships. It is therefore encumbent upon us to respond to this laughably-wrong pronouncement with one of our own.

Mr Rosedale's view of the future of the internet was wrong, because it's the future now. It can be easily-demonstrated by those with even a smattering of internet skills that Second Life did not in fact take over the internet. If it had, you'd be seeing 3D avatars everywhere, but you don't, do you? How many people do you see shopping for hair or skins on WalMart.com?

Likewise, even though you can purchase a flying car or a jetpack in Second Life, you can't get them at Ford.com or even Lexus.com. Just try it. They will look at you funny (if you're lucky) or summon Security (if you're not). Sure, there's been 3D movies, but everyone got a headache from those stupid cardboard glasses. People voted with their wallets, and what they voted for was flat isometric cows.

 

Second Life is certainly not as profitable as Facebook, given Facebook's giant fart performance in the stock market. In a cage fight, Twitter could take Second Life one-handed, with leg irons on and an eyepatch. No one can debate that. The failure of Second Life to not be reddit, Instagram, Plurk, You Tube, Google or even Habbo Hotel is so true, it is a cliché.

 No; despite all the hoopla about Second Life (even including Anshe Chung) that splashed the pages of all the top Web 2.0 buzzsheets in the early, heady days of the "let's try to generate a business with an idea to rope in ginormous amounts of users to somehow generate immense fortunes in well-timed IPOs and figure out how to make a profit from there" days, Second Life was not the future. It had no LOLcats; it had no LulzSec or Louise Boats. It had no videos of protestors getting pepper-sprayed; there was not a single SEO consultant at Linden Lab. It did have zombies, but in a "been-there, done-that" kind of way, and there were no bath salts involved. Second Life was not about apps or tablets or smartphones. Second Life had nothing to do with Mitt Romney or the TSA. You cannot eBay Second Life; it is not available on the Kindle, and there is no Raspberry PI in Second Life.



Philip Rosedale's failure to predict the future and take over the internet (leaving us all as breathless and squirming as a Japanese schoolgirl touching Harry Potter) is nothing more than the truth. If Mr Rosedale could predict the future he would have done the smart thing - figured out the winning numbers of several multi-state lotteries and bought his own island like Larry Ellison. Sure, Mr Rosedale owns several "islands" in Second Life, but do they come with former plantations and native slave girls??? We rest our case.


[Next time you try to pick a fight with The Media, Rosedale, you'd better have a better record of predicting the future than we do.]