2 interesting internet thoughts today

Both about online gaming (which, apparently, 30% of the US does--and Second Life, a life simulator rather than a traditional 'game', is played mostly by females and over-30s). Both about language on the internet, an international space. The first: in Second Life, there are a number of user-created bots (mini-programs) that you can buy in-game that do simultaneous translation with google/babelfish. The result I'm sure is horribly muddled, but decipherable. The second: in more fighting-oriented games (World of Warcraft, etc) you see a lot of multi-lingual collaboration because the game has its own mini-language, largely of English abbreviations that become understood as words in their own right. There are some common to the internet (lol-laughing out loud, brb-be right back), and some more game specific (afk-away from keyboard, kekeke-laughing [from the Korean usage] and, most disturbingly perhaps, rl-real life [as in, "my rl gf (girlfriend) is calling-brb"]).

So, could the internet be the death of language? Or is this a symptom of a wider phenomenon of mixing languages (see: English). Or is the whole internet thing overblown and nothing is honestly changing at all.