Possibly we will start to see some growth in users, as people are staying home and using their Pcs more to keep entertained.

The business use of Sl will be interesting, can it compete with Adobe Connect, Cisco Conference Connection, for collaboration and meeting purposes?

I also wonder about the developers businesses. Can they keep the income to stay afloat?

Also, Gartner has a concept called the “Hype Cycle”, which proposes that any technology (like Virtual Reality) passes through stages. One portion of the Hype Cycle is the “trough of disillusionment” where everyone dumps on the tech until people like us figure out how it’s really supposed to work. In other words, just wait a while yet, and things will be a whole lot bigger and better.

RL recession will not cause “much” damage to the SL economy.
But I’m sure there will be a lot more people that will think twice before spending cash on something now.
Also people “may” get more selective on what their inventory holds and do more in-world yard sales (or online marketplace “yard sale”-style selling).
Still: although the “golden days” may start to turn to copper (which is still valuable), in general I doubt virtual economy will experience a similar crash like the RL financial world has.

I think a lot of people do use things like SL as an escape from RL crap, so no, I am not panicking yet about SL sliding into the same brown smelly goo that the RL markets have.

Onrez is still Sheep, right?

It’ll be interesting to see if Sibley finishes the Sheep retreat from SL and leaves Xstreet champion of catalog shopping so he can focus on the web-based kiddie games he thinks are the growing market during the global recession.