Inexplicably promoted yesterday by waning tech site Slashdot, "Whatever happened to Second Life?" is a fairly wrong-headed PC Pro article by Barry Collins, but at least it's misguided in interesting ways. Collins' main complaint is that the world seems empty now:

On my first visit back in 2006, I couldn’t walk through the training level without clumsily bumping into the throng of fellow newbies. Now, there’s enough room to swing the contents of Noah’s ark, let alone a cat. I walk and then fly around the landscape for ten minutes or so, but can’t find a single soul to shoot the breeze with.

The inference of course is factually wrong -- Second Life has nearly four times as many active users as it did in 2006 (then 200K, now 750K) -- and what's worse, Collins mistakes the hype wave's crush of hapless noobs for meaningful users. What's worse still, not once in Collins' article does he mention two key words that would degrade his thesis: "Map" (as in Second Life's dynamic map), or "concurrency" (as in the number of users simultaneously logged in at any given period.) Had Collins bothered to check the map on his viewer, he'd see a constellation of in-world users -- evidence of massive concurrency, currently about 75,000 at peak, and in the 55,000 range at median. (I believe this is still the largest concurrency of any single-sharded virtual world or MMO.)

But as I mentioned, Collins is wrong in an interesting way, for truth be told, as he says, Second Life often feels experientially empty. Call it the Crowded Empty paradox:

Due to its very nature as an open-ended, user-created virtual world, Second Life will always tend to seem empty -- no mater how populated it actually is.

Why? Several reasons: