When I login to Second Life, I have goals in mind. These might be social goals: to hang out with friends, to participate in a game with or against other people, to meet new friends. Potentially they are business goals: conducting interviews, gathering quotes, business meetings. All these goals have something in common: in order to be realized, they require that people be able to hook up in-world and interact with each other.

When the presence mesh has been non-functional in the past, and for a large chunk of the last few hours (though it's back now), we have had a preview of what it's going to be like on Wednesday when we can no longer see who is online, except the people already on our friends list. In a word? Disappointing. Suddenly it becomes that much harder to determine when other people are reachable. Will we be left casting hopeful little Instant Messages into the waves like a disconsolate fisherman?