What happened to Second Life?, Cringely asks:
Facebook is hot right now and Second Life is not, and some of that comes down to the difference between fantasy and reality. Second Life is a fantasy environment — an EverQuest without the quest — and that’s the problem. It has the heavy processing requirements of a game without the rich textural depth of a Tolkein or even of real life.Facebook, being tied to the real lives of the people involved in it, never runs out of anything, whether it is server power (minimal requirements there. at least in comparison to Second Life) or stuff to talk about. Second Life is barren in comparison. By attempting to imitate life, it pales beside the real thing.