Second Life's Lost Weekend

Second Life's grid problems from last week's systemwide update bled into the weekend, leaving users unable to navigate the virtual world. The question, though, is how badly the glitches and errors are affecting the economy, and whether residents' concerns are justified.

Second Life, the 3-D virtual world created by San Francisco-based Linden Lab, has become home to both individual users and big businesses. While residents are creating virtual identities in order to design and sell goods in this virtual world for real money, corporations like Dell(DELL Quote - Cramer on DELL - Stock Picks), Toyota (TM Quote - Cramer on TM - Stock Picks) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW Quote - Cramer on SUNW - Stock Picks) are making a big push to gain traction in the burgeoning world.

Linden Lab released a new software version of Second Life on Wednesday, disabling the system for more than five hours during the change. Once residents downloaded the new update, they found themselves with a number of virtual headaches. Typically, the systemwide updates are meant to fix bugs and make essential changes to the Second Life program that will make things run smoother for users. However, Wednesday's upgrade has done nothing to aid performance of the system and has instead added to residents' frustrations.

Following Linden Lab's scheduled update, some visitors were denied the ability to log in, as the grid dealt with a bottleneck of traffic. Others had problems teleporting to different regions and using the search function, while complete regions crashed and others were laced with assorted bugs.

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