I took a few minutes pause at writing this post because i hold fond memories of Second Life and because in reality it’s still there.

But the news that Philip Rosedale is leaving Second Life role as a CEO can only mean the final demise of the once booming online virtual world. According to his blog post at SL’s official blog he’ll stay with Second Life as chairman.

I’ve played with SL full time for almost an year. I experienced all the joys and sadness of a decadent online world aimed solely at profit.

Some of you who aren’t familiar with SL must understand that the game credits could be exchanged to real US dollars and this turned the aim of the whole community to make money out of SL.

I must confess that my hands aren’t entirely clean. Being a developer it was easy for me to start creating virtual stuff to sell to the dumb masses that once inhabited SL. I mostly dwelled with casino games. Back then, gambling was the major activity in SL and i supplied a couple of casinos with all kinds of games, from slots to roulettes. Most of them were truly random and luck was indeed a factor. But there were some "special" games that where a bit tilted in favor of the house. Oddly this wasn’t generating any real inflow of cash and i turned to another source of income, i became an exchange trader.

Back then the Exchange between SL’s in game credits and dollars happened outside of Linden Labs control at a website called GOM. As one would expect you could buy and sell credits for dollars. There’s always a gap between the price at which a currency is being sold and at which it’s being bought and that’s the profit traders make.

As SL’s exchange market was quite small it fluctuated according to news of stuff happening inside the game and to SL itself, like for instance the introduction of video would boost the construction of in game theaters which meant players would require a lot of credits which in turn meant that the demand for credits would rise at the exchange thus raising the value of the currency.

I noticed that besides me there were only a hand full of others trading consistently at GOM. It didn’t take long for some traders to start organizing and collaborate in an organized way to raise our profits, driving the exchange rate up and down according to our needs.

All in all it was fun and I’ve made a couple of thousand dollars that really helped back then.

But during all that time I saw no interest by Linden Labs in creating a better SL, they held a money making factory and it was working at full steam, why bother investing when thing were going so well?

I’ve discussed this many times in the past with fellow players and most of them where true believers in Linden Labs propaganda that SL was going to be the next best thing since sliced bread. But that never happened. I hate to do this but i told you so.