I caught the bug about a month ago and happily joined Second Life to see what all the talk was about. They threw me into some vacuous place to “learn”. Immediately I wanted to find out where everyone else was… not an easy task for a newbie. Eventually, I learned to fly a little and teleport my way around. What did I find? Lots of sex shops, sketchy rave clubs and just general weirdness.  Seems like the edgelings are out in full force in Second Life.

I logged out fairly frustrated and decided “well, that’s it”. Haven’t been back since.

So it was a small surprise when I got an alert email from Linden Labs, Second Life’s creators (man would Orwell have a field day with this Big Brother setup).  They needed to tell me that their servers had been hacked and most likely my personal data, including maybe my credit card info (I don’t believe I gave it to them, though) and most certainly my paypal account information (I immediately changed the password) had been exposed.

And that’s been it on the communication front from Linden Labs. I gotta tell you. If that happened to my local bank, I can pretty much guarantee you that I would have some more follow-up then just some lame press release on a website and a half-hearted alert email.

Kind of funny that this isn’t getting much play in the blogosphere… a few of the normal suspects have weighed in (Techcrunch for instance). All in all this is just another ho-hum-hack, for most folks. I see a bigger problem. What happens when Facebook is hacked, or how about Myspace?

Dear Second Life- Get a life. I am not sure what you are cooking up over there, but maybe an apology to the people who are building this Second Life for you is in order.