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Wired UK just published a pair of articles that are a great explication of the potential of Virtual Reality to become as powerful as the Web. They fairly report the vision that Philip Rosedale has been pursuing for most of his professional lifetime. My one-sentence summaries:

Second Life was just the beginning – Philip wanted to connect the world in a seamless 3D environment, but was greatly limited by technology of the time; today many of these limitations are lifting.

VR and the CD-ROM – People are most excited about closed VR experiences today, but this is like being excited about Encarta on CD-ROM before people understood how powerful Wikipedia would become.

Good articles; read them if you are interested in VR. I have just one, entirely personal, embarrassingly picayune, totally irrelevant problem …

The first article says: “Then, in 2006, Second Life stopped growing.”

I know this to be untrue. I ran finance for SL from 2005-2006, and remained on the exec team until I left the company in 2009. We raised money in 2006, and I personally prepared the financial projections that predicted our growth through 2008. Financial projections for startups are notoriously optimistic, which is to say they are mostly composed of fairy dust and bullshit. I was surprised as anyone to notice, in 2008, that my projections of fast growth held up, quarter over quarter, with a margin of error of no more than 10% (and even at that, the projection was usually lower than actual growth). So I know that SL was still growing quite well in 2006, in every meaningful aspect of usage and business metrics. The growth rate slowed in 2008, but absolute growth was still positive in 2009 when I left. Yes, SL did stop growing eventually. But not on my watch.

Ok, that’s prideful, and it’s petty. But it’s fair to say that I’m the single most authoritative source in the world on this topic. So when I read the article, I sent a note to the reporter with a correction. He replied that he’d “check it out.” A day later, he said that he followed up and he seems to be right, and cited an article by another reporter.

That is seriously annoying. The other reporter has no better access to the facts than the original reporter. That other reporter is just another source of rumor and speculation. In this case, I am the actual source of truth, and the reporter with access to the truth chose to ignore it!

Obviously, this is trivial. Who cares? No one but me and my wounded pride. But it’s frightening to consider how easily reporters will ignore the truth when it gets in the way of their own goals.