The Second Life Herald is reporting on problems in Linden Labs’ Second Life with child porn due to allowing anonymous users to come in there (a credit card used to be required).

I haven’t been back to Second Life since Gnomedex last year because I can’t bring my son into there (the rules don’t allow it, for one, and for two they allow the worst kind of human behavior on their system). I wish it were different, cause it had a lot of promise and my son really loved being in there building stuff. And don’t tell me about the teen grid. Patrick checked that out and promptly labeled it as “lame” when compared with the adult version. Also, the fun thing we’d do is work on our virtual office together. If he’s in the teen grid we couldn’t do that.

Anyway, these issues are yet to be worked out it seems. I talked with an executive with a big multinational company over the weekend who had a successful Second Life island and he told me they are considering pulling out of Second Life. Mostly because they couldn’t get more than about 65 people into their island, which limited its usefulness to do things like press conferences and such.

UPDATE: Project Open Letter has a letter to Linden Labs about ongoing stability problems. Seems that the natives are unhappy with Linden Labs. Anything else going on? I wonder what Eric Rice thinks about all this.

Oh, and I’m still paying my monthly fee cause I’m too lazy to call them and cancel my account.

Today I’m traveling to Atlanta to a BEA event. So, that means it’s time for another book. The one I picked? The 4-Hour Workweek. I’ve already started on it, and have had lunch with author Timothy Ferriss a few times already.

It has already become a sensation. Is on the New York Times best seller list.

How did he market it? Talked with bloggers. Anything else? Not really. The dude doesn’t work hard. Just like his book says.

Me? I don’t work hard either. How’s that? I just define work as something everyone other than me does. For instance, the hardest worker is a roofer in Mexico in the summer time. Now THAT is work. What I do? Not work.

Oh, I’m interviewing him in at 10 a.m. at PodTech too. Is that work? 🙂

Valleywag today compares Facebook vs. Linked In. I’ve been thinking about the same thing lately. I have hundreds of emails waiting to be answered (I answered a bunch yesterday, but it just caused MORE email to come back in so now I’m behind again — thankfully I’ll be offline in a plane headed to a BEA event in Atlanta so I’ll have lots of time to answer emails). But a good portion of those emails include invitations from Facebook and Linked In. Last week I met an executive in Facebook and they are adding a million new users every week (which represents about 3.3% growth every week — extremely rapid growth, in other words).

Facebook already turned down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo. Why did they do that? Because they know that the advertising market is heating up. MySpace sold for less than that, but in a deal with Google alone got all that money back and more. Facebook is sitting on a gold mine.

I don’t like Linked In (high profile bloggers who put their email and cell phone number on their blog don’t need to join reputation networks to get jobs and other stuff) but I must admit that it is rocking and rolling and speeding up in adoption, not slowing down. I’m very impressed by the job (and the quality of people they’ve gotten to join their system).

My LinkedIn and Facebook requests are not just from people I don’t know. CEOs, CTOs, etc from tons of companies are joining both. Kevin Rose and I had dinner a few days back and he personally begged me to join Facebook. I still haven’t, cause I need fewer things in my life, not more. Twitter dramatically took down my productivity (I’ve been spending less time there trying to get things done) and until I have no emails in my inbox I can’t join new things. But I can stand back and admit my awe of what they’ve done in the marketplace.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook goes public or gets sold for more than $3 billion. They are sitting on a gold mine.

“But Scoble, what if they turn out to be like PointCast?” That’s what several people have asked me when we’ve talked about this. Well, I was on PointCast for two weeks early on. I quit it fast because it tried to lock me in and wouldn’t let me link to articles on it and wouldn’t let me copy text from it. That caused me to start badmouthing it to my friends.

Facebook doesn’t have those problems. All I see is positive growth for it. Linked In does get some negative feelings cause of the email stream it causes, but that’s pretty easily solvable and sure hasn’t slowed down its growth the way I thought it might.

Do you agree or disagree?