It was with much fanfare that  Reuters opened a virtual office in Second Life in 2006.

The news service has since comes to grips with an essential truth about SL: It never lived up to its hype.

As UK paper The Register notes, Reuters has closed its Second Life Bureau and pulled embedded reporter Adam Pasick aka Adam Reuters out of SL's metaverse, assigning him to, one presumes, more tangible duties. A Reuters spokesperson told The Register:

We're still reporting on Second Life, but only as part of our usual tech and media coverage.

Meanwhile, Silicon Alley Insider has a first-person account from Eric Krangel, the original Reuters staffer assigned to SL:

Is Second Life dying? No, but the buzz is gone...

 

It's hard to say what, if anything, Linden Lab can do to make Second Life appeal to a general audience. The very things that most appeal to Second Life's hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let's not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life)...

 

It was about as fun as watching paint dry.

GP: There are so many jokes one can make about Second Life. Our favorite? Chris Williams of The Register writes:

Last one to leave, turn off the flying penis.