If I had to decide which Second Life feature was the most profoundly useful to me, it wouldn't be the group tools, or streaming movies on a prim. Sculpted prims would certainly be in the running, but the "lumpy" nature of sculpties makes them less revolutionary than I had hoped (they aren't very good for, say, a car fender.) I would have to say, the coolest, most useful, "thank god I have them" feature, summed up in one word is:

Megaprims.

But I'm a little worried right now. Linden Lab appears to be fishing around for what the reaction would be to the removal of megaprims in a recent blog post by Michael Linden. Some cynics may say this is nothing more than an obligatory symbolic gesture before they go ahead and remove megaprims anyways. But I'm not cynical! I'm all sunshine, baby! So go ahead and read what Michael's has to say over at the Official Linden Lab blog. I'll take a shot at addressing his concerns here.

Kuula and surrounding sims were buried under a giant plywood megaprim at 5am on 11 January. The size of the prim is uncertain, but it's believed to have covered 9 sims in total. No texture other than the default plywood texture was applied and the prim was set phantom, so it obstructed sight, rather than movement. However, any attempts to select it resulted in viewer crashes for the residents.

The prim appeared and disappeared from view, largely at random, unable to be seen from most vantage points, but still interfered with all object interactions and avatar-to-avatar object/money transfers. Spike Linden responded to calls through Help Request, and while he was not initially able to see the offending object, found a viewing angle where it became visible and was able to have the object removed.

Thanks to Beverly Montgomery for the information and the image.