Is Second Life the Paris Hilton of Virtual Worlds?

An anonymous reader writes "Second Life appears to be suffering a bit of a backlash from its PR efforts. Matt Mihaly over at The Forge, newly-returned muckracker Peter Ludlow at the Second Life Herald and Tony Walsh at Clickable Culture have all recently taken Linden Labs to task for their non-stop, arguably deceitful, PR machine and frequent downtime. Further, over on Terranova a veritable cornucopia of long-time, experienced virtual world developers, including Raph Koster, Mike Sellers, Randy Farmer, the aforementioned Matt Mihaly, and Daniel James, have piled on, calling into question the fundamental utility of Second Life. Does Second Life have real utility, or is it simply an endless exercise in unsubstantiated public relations? What do Slashdot readers think?"

Comments

Re:Or to give it its full name...

[GodfatherofSoul]

Except the market is subject to forces that can cause illegitimate changes to an object's worth. You can define worth by market price or by it's true value (how to calculate that is beyond me). And, buyers don't always set the market price, such as in cases of collusion. What about Walmart undercutting pharmacies (and selling drugs at a loss)? That's definitely a case where worth and value are (were?) different. There are so many cases that blow the idealistic free market value system out of the water.