DISQUS

Couldn't agree more. I should imagine in most cases you know within 15 minutes if you want to spend another 30 minutes on it.

On the subject of saying 'no' - personally I love people that say no, and quickly, in all areas of business. People (particularly those in middling positions in larger companies in my experience) for whom 'no' is a dirty word and who would much rather make non-committal utterances like 'very interesting' etc. are a major bugbear of mine. They'll do this for months and then just stop returning calls/emails, as if that's somehow better than a 'no' would have been. A very curious mix of misguided politeness, incredible rudeness and downright cowardice, and a huge waste of everyone's time. Join my campaign to stamp this out, by telling people 'no' as soon as possible in any potential business relationship!

I can't help but feel that the primary reason for Linden Labs to acquire a virtual broker is to help them maintain the illusion that there is a genuinely interesting economy in Second Life - i.e. moving the story on from being "Look, people can make money in Second Life" to "Companies operating in Second Life have been acquired".

I find it difficult to get a grip on the realities of the economics of SL, but some clues from http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php#... show that, for Dec 08, 940,000 people logged in, of which 60,000 had a 'positive Linden Dollar flow' (ie theoretically made money). It's not clear whether this 60,000 includes the premium members who get given free money each month (my guess is it does), so I reckon we're looking at 20k or so people actually making money (Linden Dollars) in that month (ie 2% of people).

To me, that doesn't look like an economy (2% of people having net positive cashflow), it looks, at best, like a bad videogame with a small percentage of its users making money from user generated content. Like Half Life, only not as much fun. At worst, it looks like the emperor's got not clothes on and this is just a pyramid scheme reliant upon the brilliant marketing conceit of persuading the press that there's something interesting at work. And what better story in today's uncertain climate than the acquisition of a company in a virtual economy?

Thanks for that. It's made me feel rather better about the world this morning!