ON VIRTUAL WORLDS GOING MAINSTREAM

VIRTUAL VISIONS

Well, living in Virtual Worlds has made the cover of Business Week, in a story titled "My Virtual Life".  The article's author Rob Hof, spent weeks as an "Avatar" in one of the leading virtual online services, Second Life (SL).  Rob blogs about that preparation here.

The story is well-done for mainstream audiences, although veterans of online gaming and online life in general will likely find it a bit basic.

As someone who's had a second life in Second Life, and in the text-based worlds of MUDs and MUSHes (remember those?) almost half a life-time ago, all this brings about a sense of deja vu.

It also gets one excited about the mainstream possibilities for this technology, not the least of which is to create a virtual, global user-interface for the next version of the internet, with the commerce, content, and community of today's web and yesterday's online services...and more.

Some like Dave Winer have suggested that these technologies might represent the next operating system of the internet.  That certainly is a possibility, but today's services, be they Second Life, or the rich gaming worlds of Worlds of Warcraft, have a long, long way to go before we can truly say that. 

Certainly, the worlds can represent all the bad things that human beings are capable of, but the wide range of positive things that can be done online, represent a net positive, in my humble opinion.

Although the BW article focused on mainstream consumer applications and possibilities of these "worlds", there are potential enterprise, commercial, and professional applications as well.

As an example, check out this post from the CogDogBlog, about how one company is experimenting with holding employee meetings in Second Life.

As of today, Second Life has a little over 190,000 "residents", and more visitors.

Commerce of around $200,000 a day in real currency occurs on the site, and all the metrics are said to be growing.  That's roughly a dollar a day per resident, give or take a few pennies.

Many of these folks have invested real dollars to buy virtual real estate, which can cost thousands of dollars for private islands, and thousands more per month in maintenance fees.

And these are only the real early, early adopters.

Also, as Fred Wilson noted earlier this month, Linden Labs, the company that developed SL, got a funding boost from VCs and heavy-weight entrepreneurs recently:

"...it was announced yesterday that Globespan Partners along with some big name entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, Mitch Kapor, and Pierre Omidyar put $11 million into Linden Labs."

The infrastructure investments to maintain and grow these services have to keep pace with users and their usage, so the extra funding is a good thing.

These virtual worlds with their current number of users and activities already tax most of today's PCs, their graphics cards, and the internet broadband networks and connections available to us today. 

So we'll need to continue to see substantial  improvements on all those fronts to make these services really hum for tens if not hundreds of millions of people online concurrently.

The popularity of games like Sims Online and World of Warcraft show that there is mainstream potential for this stuff down the road.

But realizing the long-term vision suggested in articles like the Business Week piece will take some time.  Not to mention that getting there from here is not going to be an easy game.

 

Comments

[Jeffrey Allen]

Is this the current edition of BusinessWeek?