“Something web-based should be better suited to handle scaling issues than a setups like SL.”

Should be is not “all services … can scale”

Of course scaling of any individual project will depend on backend hosting, coding, resources, but I think it’s easily proven that a one to many experience on the internet (especially using scaled resources like S3) is a more scalable architecture than current virtual world experiences with places like There and Second Life.

I mean really, does anybody have to challenge this when you can get, what, 40 people or so on a single server in SL? Compare that to even a very poorly coded MMORPG website like say Duels (see my past post) and the two aren’t in the same league.

As for Microsoft buckling? They didn’t do it under the strain of 75 simultaneous visitors, that is for certain.

I was careful in the piece not to crown something unseen as any sort of SL killer, but I think a web-based architecture is much more sound and more viral than SL ever will be with the current server limitations.

If Linden would get off their butts and open source the server I’m sure we’d see improvement over the avatar in sim/server limitation, but even in an optimal circumstance I don’t see that overtaking a fine-tuned web-based scenario.

Never say never though

…Or did you never notice Microsoft server outages, Warcraft forum crashes, or play any of the virtual pet games…

Just because some web servers can scale does not lead to the conclusion that all services run on the web can scale.