This past Sunday, Second Life experienced a “terrorist attack” where martial law (not kidding) had to be declared. No one got hurt, but it was an “attack” that ended up shutting down an entire economy. Apparently a programmer of some sort created spinning gold rings in the virtual world that once touched by users (who obviously will touch anything) began to replicate and chase people around. The worm script continued to multiply and infest the 2700+ servers Linden Labs operates. The immediate impact was a bad user experience in the form of lag and dropped connections for users. Linden invoked a sort of martial law to lock people out while they cleaned up the mess.

Although this terrorist attack didn’t necessarily instill fear or take lives, it did have a similar residual effect as 1^st life terrorism, the loss of production. I wonder how many businesses were impacted by such an attack, one so massive that it put the world at a stand still. I’m sure money was lost as this was one of the largest online game attacks in history. It makes me wonder how this sort of event will continue to evolve as our interactions with virtual worlds evolve. My guess is this was a typical “see if it can be done” hacker, but what will happen in the future when people start to use Second Life (or any other virtual world) in a more integrated (to your 1^st life) manner? Will virtual classrooms be shut down by people protesting the school? Will virtual economies be cut off because one country disagrees with another? Email distributed viruses that were once a “see if it can be done” sort of thing have now become channels for “real” terrorist activities, why not our virtual worlds?

Google recently launched a new testing site, SearchMash. It’s an interesting concept for multiple reasons but mostly because it is a live user experience test for their flagship product. The quote from Google about SearchMash goes something like this, “The goal of SearchMash is to test innovative user interfaces in order to continually improve the overall search experience for our users.” It’s a great idea to field test something like this in a live environment and get data on the fly, I wish there were more companies doing it this way. It will be great when they start to integrate the findings into the actual Google search. I like what I see so far in things like bringing images to the same search results page, a separated call out for Wikipedia entries, and collapsable boxes. If they went one step further and made the boxes customizable like on the personalized Google Homepage (ability to “resize” and reorder) then this would be my default search engine.

The linking option menu is a nice touch as well, I especially like the “More from this site option” where it narrows the search to one particular site. They were also clever in adding a simple survey, “were these results useful to you?” in the right hand column. I think they should integrate AdSense next and see what users do.