I’ve seen a crop of new multi-tools spring up over Second Life over the last few weeks; it seems to be the latest fad.  Timeless Prototype’s Multigadget was the first multitool I remember, and when he made it, it was actually pretty creative:  a list of common, simple functions consolidated in one attachment rather than spread out over many.

Multitools today, though… I don’t know.  They’re some of the laggiest things I’ve ever seen; some of them sport script times roughly equal to wearing 5 or 6 network vendors on your body.  They seem to one-up each other with sheer feature numbers (”Over here!  103 features!”  ”No, over here; 172 features!”).

Adding more and more features is an attractive folly, but it’s still a folly.  I’m willing to bet the average user has never even seen all the “features” their multi-tools sport (some of these features being obscure off-shoots of other features) but we all have to suffer the lag caused by all of these unused features.

Somebody should rethink this concept.