How does the retention rate fare against Twitter? Much as I love Twitter, the drop off rate on the service is probably high as well, and if you take into account the relative simplicity of twitter compared to the Mt Everest like leaning curve of Second Life, then there may well be more to say about the attention span of users, rather than the first hour failure of newbies in SL.

That saying, the Lab sorely needs to deal with how it's new users fare in their first hour.

It's all very well having flashy machinima (we can all do a spray transition you know!), that shows all these people having a great time in SL - but unless you effectively handle the sharding of your load so users can see anything when they get online, let alone move, and then give them no real help to find their niche community... why would they stay?

I want SL to succeed, I want business to use it - it's a perfect platform for collaborative work - in a way that blows Google Wave out of the water.

The Lab needs to stop being scared of their best resource and their most important customer - their community.