[princetontiger]

People forget that companies like Groupon and Zynga are still real businesses. Both are still $1B+ market caps.

As someone who went to both IPO lunches, it was a wild time. Throw Renren, and several other companies from that time period into the mix. 2012 was almost 5 years ago. Unbelievable. Well, at least tech companies actually did go public.

[ghaff]

To add another one, Linden Lab (Second Life) is still around too. Though it's not in that range--brings in about $60M/year [1] Certainly not the revolutionary thing it was going to be once but the shocking part is that it exists at all.

[1] http://www.zdnet.com/article/second-life-lessons-what-linden...

[mountaineer22]

Is that 60 million in Linden or US currency?

Seriously, though, they could have a renaissance with the next AR/VR round.

[ajmurmann]

Everything about their engine and viewer was still do bad last time I checked that I would be shocked if they could possibly pull proper VR off. I never understood why the controls completely reinvented the wheel instead of being more like what we are used to from video games.

[DrStalker]

The nature of Second Life makes optimization a challenge. The geometry is fully dynamic so you can't pre-compute line of sight or use a lot of other performance saving tricks. The people making things are not skilled with efficient 3D design, so even if there was a way to do things like remove hidden triangles from models most people would not use it. Textures get uploaded in ridiculous sizes for things that should be using low res sheeted textures.

And even if you manage to build yourself a nice efficient well designed island other people will show up with avatars wearing massively over-detailed jeweler with 4k textures on every surface and with a few buggy CPU-killing addons that fight each other to try and fix a few of Second Life's design problems, and suddenly your server is on it's knees begging for more CPU cycles while your grapics card is busy choking every time their avatar is near.

The short version is when people can build anything you'll get some amazing works but you'll also get a lot of poor quality, performance killing crap. I don't see VR changing that, but there is a place for a Second-Life life competitor that limits what people can do to hit a nice balance of performance vs. freedom.

[mountaineer22]

So, Second Life is MySpace, and we are waiting on the Facebook version of SL?

Interesting.

I kind of see how Snapchat is positioning itself against Facebook in this arena.

[ajmurmann]

I agree with everything you say. However, my point was really about the HUD and keyboard and mouse controls. Just moving around used to be so hard and unintuitive. Not sure if it still is because I haven't logged in in years.

[estefan]

Pretty sure I read a while ago that Zynga's corporate HQ which they bought was now worth more than their business. Or maybe it was some other company with no long-term competitive advantage.