Citing World of Warcraft as a support for the future of SL is entirely invalid. WoW is principally a game, and most importantly based in closed-source, professionally generated content. This, combined with the serious issues regarding the published Linden Labs usage statistics opens the vision for criticism. I remain open to being convinced, but I cannot see an application domain for SL which cannot better be achieved with a web page.

Trust is a very complex subject in computing, and as time goes on, the previous ‘Newtonian’ certainty has been supplanted by a more ‘Quantum’ approach. We still lack a substantive method for finding out who is sitting at the desk, pressing the keys. There is a complex relationship – if I trust Livejournal to be secure, reliable and reputable, it’s likely that I will be happy to accept an individual’s credentials. OpenID does not purport to solve this problem, as ‘trust requires identity first’.