Get a First Life. Membership is Free

Second Life has been receiving a great deal of mostly positive press over the past several months. The positive press began around the time Second Life claimed one million members. Later Reuters set up a news center inside Second Life which generated more coverage. Second Life received still more press when they claimed two million members which some blogs disputed.

Then Sears set up a show room in the virtual world -- although this may have been too much reality for Second Life. How much realism do you really want in your virtual world? Now, blogger Darren Barefoot has set up an amusing Second Life parody called Get a First Life at www.getafirstlife.com. The site tells people to "Go Outside. Membership is Free."

First off, I am not a Second Life hater. Let me say that again: I am not a Second Life hater. I'm on record as saying that there's something important going on inside the game.

That said, I've been bemused by the amount of hype and attention the game...er...virtual world thingee has received over the past three months. The media has been on SL like white on rice. I've only written about SL a couple of times on this site, but I've probably received five enquiries from sundry Canadian news outlets asking if I played, or knew anybody who played, or knew anybody who was making a six figure income from playing, and so forth.

Barefoot is selling t-shirts from Cafepress in the hopes of making some money off the site or at least covering some of his bandwidth bill. Barefoot told complaining irritants on Digg that last year when he did a parody called iCryptex he "got a good chunk of traffic, but all I got for that was a bandwidth bill. So, this time around I wanted to make a little money without having a ridiculously monetized (and therefore compromised) site."

Linden Lab, the creators of Second Life, are being good sports about the parody. Boing Boing reports that Darren Barefoot received a positive ""Proceed and Permitted" letter from Linden Lab. Second Life Insider, Laughing Squid, YesButNoButYes and BL Ochman have more to say about First Life. Still more discussion of Get a First Life can be found here on Techmeme.