Last weekend Linden Lab started selling Second Life starter packs on Amazon, including this one above, for L$1000 and a hoverboard, which was originally being given away for free as a promotional offer, and two funny things happened: SL users immediately started trying to exploit the offer; so much so, that Linden Lab prematurely pulled it. ("[T]he promotional offer was terminated early due to repeated attempts to circumvent the one-per-customer limit," Linden spokesman Peter Gray tells me.) But despite doing that, the promotional offer is now the top seller in the Free-to-Play Games category on Amazon, above offerings from extremely popular free-to-play MMOs like Battlestar Galactica and RuneScape. So now a lot of Amazon customers who buy virtual items for their favorite freemium game are probably seeing Second Life as a retail offering there for the first time.

"We saw great demand for the deal," Gray added to me, "and hope to be able to offer similar special promotions in the future." I hope they do -- but I also hope the Lindens see the larger opportunity here: