There's a lot of good comparisons between Second Life as it is now, and the World Wide Web of the early 1990's. Many people laughed at the notion of the Web as ever becoming mainstream. Many of those who thought it would still considered that it would never become useful as a marketing, business or commerce platform. Many others thought the beginnings of the avalanche of big businesses onto the World Wide Web were bringing about about the ruin of it.

Guess that all sounds pretty familiar, huh?

So, when it comes to Second Life, what do you think? Are all the big businesses tearing the place up, marginalizing you, your venues and your business? Are they bringing value in? Cue traditional SF blurb: "Will they save the world ... or destroy it?" Perhaps they'll do both. Or neither.

The Internet is generally said to have been born in 1969, with ARPAnet. Or in 1977 when Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf introduced TCP (the transmission control protocol). Take your pick. Either way, the Internet (everyone just called it 'the net' back then)was in increasing use among software developers, research institutions and well-heeled hobbyists for quite some years before Berners-Lee introduced the World Wide Web in 1990/91. Better grab some coffee, this is going to take us a few minutes.

The World Wide Web was very much an ad-hoc and semi-anarchic collaborative medium back in those days. Some people used the CERN developed source code for the earliest web-servers. Others hammered out their own code. People began to work on HTML parsers and presentation managers/browsers. The Web at the time outside the core group of researchers and technical hobbyists was sparse, and stylistic variations led to assorted incompatibilities, and what one might charitably call 'uneven experience'.

The World Wide Web was a hit, however, and pulled people online not only for it, but for existing parallel technologies, like IRC, and the popular virtual worlds of the period. And that's approximately where the outcry began, in approximately 1994. One lesser Internet demagogue of the period summed it up like this: "It's like having a million people barge into your lounge-room, pushing and shoving each-other, knocking over the ashtrays and all shouting at once, and...most of all, complaining about your decor and furniture."