Allen, one of my favorite bloggers (who I only recently started to read, which is my loss), has a great curmudgeonly post on Web 2.0. (I consider Allen a fellow neo-luddite, whether or not he agrees with that characterization.) He…

I think experimentation is fine and I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see those experiments take off. However, to those of us in the sector living in mundane-nonprofit-world it won’t cause us to add a position just to do it until serious money starts to show up.

See Koster’s post – he suggests 120-150,000 regular users. If you look at the Linden stats on frequency, you’ll see the spread. But, I don’t think it is totally a numbers game … after all nonprofits are not corporations … and we go after niche markets. Who is the audience in SL and is that who need to reach? Why are you doing a SL project? Is that the best channel for what you want to do.

Also, the big point is that the future isn’t so much as a game – but as platform.

And, with all this blather – we’re essentially agreeing!!! Except for you seem to be saying – forget it – it’s crap. I’m saying, for most it isn’t appropriate, but some it might be worth a low risk experiment depending on audience and outcomes.

My argument is data-driven and just plain common sense. Myspace is still (for all its warts) a probably better bet than SL at this point. The sheer numbers are there. Youtube/Google falls under the same rubric. You gotta go where the people (and their money) are.

Much of my experience in virtual worlds is derived from my earlier experiences in one of the earliest 3d communities, Alphaworld and my constant video gaming. I even ran a Counterstrike server for some time that had a small community of hundreds of players. I’m also an avid player of Battlefield 2. I usually don’t do the MMORPG thing but I’ve dabbled in it from time to time (City of Spandex, er Heroes). I think SL follows the MMORPG model but only time will tell. On the other hand, we’ve seen similar virtual communities try to last and eventually die long slow deaths. We’ve seen that happen with Friendster already.

Does the notion of an open-ended MMO title like SL mean that it will transcend the normal lifetime of an MMO? I don’t know but I don’t give it high hopes. There’s already an open-ended MMORPG out there that has been around longer than SL. It’s called The Sims Online. Much larger marketing budget, more press, every advantage that SL has — and the result? Stagnancy within 36 months. I don’t purport to know why this is but it seems to be closely tied to hardware refresh cycles. Basically, every three years is when completely new graphics and CPUs comes out that enables some other new MMORPG to give users a richer experience.