Late Friday afternoon (PST-time), Linden Lab announced a ‘Special Promotion’ on the SecondLife website. As you can see above, they offered a free “Starter Vehicle Pack” plus L$1,000. The ‘catch’ (apparently) was LL’s desire to get users to link their Second Life and Amazon accounts.
Well, L$1,000 isn’t much (it’s about half a cheeseburger) and I don’t particularly need a hoverboard, but Free is Free and I could see potential advantages linking the two accounts. Anyway, the offer was only good this weekend, so I clicked through the links on Saturday at 5:00AM PST. Here’s the Amazon offer I landed on.
“Currently unavailable.
We don’t know when or if this item
will be available again.”
Cough. Somehow I don’t think this is going to improve users’ attitudes toward LL’s Customer Service.
In an effort to put some positive spin on this, I thought Chaos Mandelbrot’s motto might apply here: “Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.“ Nonetheless, I still had the feeling that Second Life just RickRolled many of us. 
A few months ago Rod Humble asked SL’s members for suggestions on how to attract more hardcore users to Second Life. I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m pretty certain today’s Amazon ‘Special Offer’ pratfall isn’t going to help.
