Baba Sucks

Imagine a time in the future when fancy tools for creation are not standard. The amount of optional tools in the Second Life library has grown too large to ship along with the client for general use. Most of the advanced tools are available as plugins only.

For the normal user, this is not a problem because they are mostly browsers. They bookmark their favorite areas and have a collection of their favorite objects and programs, but they don’t ever use the advanced plugins available because they don’t have a need for them. Most of the stuff they think they want has already been made, and new stuff shows up every day from hundreds of popular creators.

A user might not have the tools to create a chair, but he had hundreds of available chairs that he could rez at a moment’s notice from his inventory. Some of them are provided in free collections he subscribes to and others he has collected or purchased along the way. The same goes for almost any object he could want. Someone else has already made something at least close to an exact match.

The plugins that he has downloaded and installed are those that help him keep track of the objects he has and find new things that he might not have yet. He also has chat plug-ins that integrate his Yahoo messenger account with Second Life.

This is fine for most users because that’s all they want from Second Life. They’re the same people who are devoted to Myspace and other such sites. Someone else handles the hard part of creation because they just want to hang out with friends and have a bit of fun, share their latest cool gadgets and plan for the next time they will meet up to go out clubbing.

This kind of activity requires thousands of creators working to put out the content people want.
I’ve heard people complaining about how Second Life focuses so much on business and new technology at the expense of the normal user, but you have to think about it from the other way around. The people who Linden Lab is appealing to now are the people who in the future will be building the experiences of every new user who uses Second Life. Linden Lab is not ignoring you when they focus on those people who are doing business in Second Life; they are building up the support structure for the future, when millions of users will be joining up and looking constantly for new content and experiences.

Second Life has to be ready for this influx.

How Many People Will be in Second Life One Year From Today? - Reuben Steiger
The future of VWs over a quarter - Dmitri Williams