It's the end of the world as we know it....

Do you feel fine?

Has it finally happened? Has the end come to Second Life? Has the GRID collapsed upon itself as many have been predicting?

The world of Second Life has been SEVERELY hampered since this past weekend, and as of yet, no fix has been found. The only comments coming out of the Official Blog of Second Life is, "We are still working to fix the problems, thank you for your patience".

I suppose one thing is true of the Second Life Community, we have plenty of patience, but I would be willing to bet, even our patience has a limit. I, and others like me, have been warning Linden Lab for months that the GRID is so unstable that one day it will most likely just collapse upon itself and it will take days if not weeks to fix. Well, so far DAYS has come true, God help Second Life if it continues into weeks.

I told Philip Rosedale, early on in our discussions, that the WORST possible thing that could happen would be to have Second Life disabled for a number of days. While the individual Residents might overlook something that serious, the Commercial Companies most likely would not. I wonder just how many of those Commercial Entities are now strongly considering pulling out of the ailing world of Second Life? If they go, I fear, so goes Second Life.

Linden Lab already has taken a HUGE financial loss by banning ALL gambling within the Second Life world, on top of that, if the major Commercial Entities begin to pull out, can Second Life survive? I suppose Linden Lab should be considering how they are going to raise more capital at this point; perhaps they'll bring back the LIFETIME accts for all of you that want to help Linden Lab out of the hole they've dug for themselves. Instead of "Charter Member" they could call those people, "One Born every Minute".

I for one have been making contingency plans in case Second Life does die an ugly death soon. Below is a list of upcoming Virtual World titles that are accepting Beta registrations at the moment, while I have only logged into moove, I guess I have the time now, while we all anxiously await to hear what, if anything, can be done to revive the world of Second Life:

HiPiHi - A Chinese version of Second Life - Looks pretty interesting actually. Usually takes 24 hours to get accepted into the Beta.

Moove - This is actually LIVE (I think) and it's a cross between a VR3D World and Second Life. I wouldn't say this is a good substitute for Second Life, but it's fun figuring out just how a Texture Maker like myself would survive in a world like this.

AWOMO - A World of My Own - This actually looks good from what they allow you to see, and BETA was supposed to start in early July, it's not clear whether that has happened or not, but they are accepting Beta Applications, so why not give it a try?

It's the end of the world as we know it...and I hate to say "I told you so", but I did.