Hacker Friendly

While Second Life has certainly had a mainstream news love fest in the last couple of months, today was remarkable in that the Seattle Times ran not just one, but two stories about the virtual world.

While there is a lot of speculation about where Linden Lab is taking this whole experiment, I found this quote from CEO Philip Rosedale particularly interesting:

“If we’re remembered someday as the company that started this all, I think the thing that would be cool, that would feel rewarding, was just to feel that we made it happen a few years earlier than it otherwise would have,” he says.

I think it will be interesting to see Linden Lab’s definition of “this all” evolve in the upcoming months. All of the media attention is certainly throwing some kerosene on the already raging rate of adoption. While it took about three years for Second Life to grow from public beta to 1,000,000 residents, today’s resident count (just over one month later) is 1,544,730. That’s about 50% growth in just over four weeks. Yowza.

It would be great to see some data comparing popular news articles to the exponential rate of adoption Second Life has enjoyed in the last couple of months. (Unfortunately, the MMOG chart hasn’t been updated since July…) I hope we’ll see a new release from the MMOGChart guys at the end of the year.