They're closing because eddie's never heard of them? The US military's heard of them, which is why they use their game engine for some of their projects. MTV's heard of them, which is why There also hosted the Laguna Beach games.

There came out about the same time as SL, but they were two completely different flavors. There was more of a glorified chatroom with a great world/physics engine. I was active for a good number of years, but dropped off about a year or two ago. It's a shame to see it go down, but it's not a surprise, the place has been a graveyard lately.

It's a loss for a couple reasons, the biggest one being the impressive scale of the planet and it's impressively minimal lag. The cel-shade style characters were pretty cool, also. Quite expressive, especially with moving the mouths along with the in-game voice chat. Very convincing.

It was a niche, but I doubt anything will really take it's place. Not completely.