Forums axed - a logical next step

I am a little sad of it myself, because the forums are often the easiest way, to keep up at least a little connection to SL when I am on the road and don't have the bandwidth available to connect to SL. But this will soon be gone as most forums will be frozen and phased out, as Robin Linden posted yesterday. And even though many good weblogs have appeared lately there never was a more comfortable way to get an overview about current trends and opinions than with the forums.

On the other hand: would you expect someone to create and maintain "A Forum for the Internet"? :)

As it is obviously the policy of Linden Lab to present Second Life as a (the?) platform on which to build the Web 3D, the Metaverse or whatchamaycallit it is a logical next step to give up the one central point of information distribution and discussion on All Things Second Life that were the forums. This is another job that residents will have to do on their own. And I don't doubt for a second that they will do a much better job than the Lindens could ever do - in the long run.

In the short run I doubt, if some of the substitutes for forum functionalities, Robin has named in her blog entry, will work nearly half a good as what we have today. And while it might be very hard to accept that for the Lindens: there is a need - or at least the desire - for many residents to be able to access at least a slice of Second Life from the web. This might be possible in the future. But just now many functionalities - which could very well be used from outside SL and through low bandwidth connections - are either not available on the web or only in a very mediocre form.

But maybe that is just "room for improvement" and an incentive for residents to "build a better mousetrap".