Okay, so AOL made a big splash with their islands when they first came out, but what have they done there lately?

Another grand opening with a bunch of hype, soon to become a museum without any human presence?

Since it takes effort to render up Henry Luce and have him spin in his virtual grave, Time continues to slide down the slippery slope into journo-irrelevance with more off-the-mark shallow pop culture commentary:

We're sure that somebody out there is enjoying Second Life®, but why?

Let's see..

• Good music and itneraction with performers.
• Collaboration on interesting builds (multiplayer Visio)
• Real-time racing in cars, boats on tracks I can design myself.
• Getting to know interesting people.

Nowhere do you see "Meet and suffer the outrage of a bored Time reporter who has their settings jacked up to lag them into oblivion beyond what the Time Warner firewalls and proxies do to them." on my list.

Visually, this vast virtual world can be quite impressive, but it's notoriously slow to load (it runs on free software you have to download) and difficult to navigate, even with a broadband connection.

Pathfinder wasn't exactly a walk through the park either, jackass.

You interact in the space through an avatar, but creating and personalizing this animated representation of yourself is tedious.

I believe TamK has two words for you: "Learning curve."

Know what's tedious? Waiting for Roadrunner tech support to pick up the phone. Or the AOL postmasters to remove a block on your address/network.

Movements feel clunky and there can be a terrible lag.

Better check your Roadrunner connection... someone cut a cable again?

As on many sites, there's a learning curve for novices, but Second Life®'s is simply too steep.

And this is a bad thing? Keeps the clogs out of those Internets tubes, I think.

And there are crazy people around every corner -- disruptive types that spread graffiti and get in your way and throw you off your groove.

Can you point these folks out on AOL Pointe?

Oh. Wait. Nobody hangs out there anymore.

Heh.

It's been over two months since I've seen a legitimate griefer anywhere, actually. Just a jackass Waffen Outfitters jerk in Nazi duds.

If anything, the annoyances have been just someone leaving their rezzed objects laying around in a place by accident, easily solved with a right-click return.

Fans praise Second Life® as a virtual hangout where you can meet and chat and buy sneakers and real estate (that's fake stuff for real money) and dance and go bowling and have sex -- suggesting that "virtual humans" doing "human things" online in Second Life® is somehow less pathetic than, say, cooking Kaldorei spider kabobs or making magic pantaloons in World of Warcraft.

Or being paid to write hatchet-jobs like this based on 1 hour of using a program on a shaky corporate box with a graphics card on the level of an Atari 2600, thinking you're about to get that Pulitzer through the mail any day now.

The corporate world's embrace of the place as a venue for staff meetings and training sessions does seem to lend Second Life® a layer of legitimacy.

It's certainly difficult to scale, with a reasonable limit of 40 avatars per sim with 4-sim venue connections, but 160 people together in one place for full interaction without controls or limits would be just as unruly in RL, right?

But then, I'm thinking in terms of music acts and not corporate uses. I know plenty of small venue dives, 30 or 40 folks at Firehouse or Kay's here in Houston, or 100 in Rockefelers in the day people enjoying the music.

But maybe it's a case of some CEOs trying too hard to be hip.

Yeah, well, it's better than CEO's engineering a bad-faith mergers and walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars after lying to the FCC about opening up AOL's instant messenger to third-parties to make the merger go through, right?

Parsons... heh. What a flake. Makes Carly Fiorina's merger of Compaq-HP look like genius by comparison.