3pointD.com

Second Life resident Torley Linden (formerly Torley Torgeson, until she became an employee of Linden Lab) has a post on her blog yesterday about how to stop notecard spam — i.e., the repeated delivery of notecards to your avatar from an automated object — in Second Life. While Torley notes that the problem is occasionally unintentional, it raises an interesting point. Podcaster extraordinaire John Swords (producer of SecondCast and the Metaverse Sessions) has a theory that no software platform can be called truly successful until people start writing security apps like spamblockers for it. The thing is, though, that SL’s in-world communication tools are fairly crude, so building a spamblocker may not even be possible. And we’ve yet to grapple with the problems and solutions that will arise as more and more SL functionality becomes Web-based. By John’s measure, though, notecard spam may be a good sign. Does Torley’s post mark the beginning of SL’s maturity?