Second Life: The world that wasn't there
Remember Second Life? The service, launched by Linden Labs back in 2003, has lost a bit of steam recently. All of the hype that accompanied this online virtual world when it first appeared evaporated as people got caught up in a frenzy over Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking tools such as Google Buzz. However, Second Life hasn't gone away, In fact, Linden Labs has just launched a beta version of a new Second Life viewer with some interesting new features.
Image by ialja via Flickr
Unlike many other virtual worlds, Second Life doesn't necessarily have quests or goals. Instead, it focuses
on flexibility, allowing its users to build their own objects, with a high degree of interactivity. You can play online video on vast billboards of your own creation, for example, and you can build houses for your virtual avatars to live in.
The new viewer is designed to be easier to use, and it also includes a nifty new feature - the ability to share interactive web media inside the virtual world. In practice, this means that you can create surfaces in Second Life that display web pages that are fully interactive. You could read Geektown on a display in Second Life, for example, and you could even attach multiple web pages to a cube, and walk around it.
But, why would you? Advocates of Second Life talk enthusiastically about the ability to interact with a funky world of your own choosing. You could attend a virtual conference, take a virtual course online, and then slope off to a virtual nightclub, listen to music, and make your avatar dance the night away. I've spent some time in this make-believe world, and have actually seen people do this (or rather, seen their avatars do it).
Some might say that this is all a little sad. Surely, you'd rather go and hang out with your friends in a real bar, look them in the eye, and raise a real world glass in their honour, watching the light glint off its surface, and hearing their laughter as jokes pass back and forth across the table? Sure, Second Life includes the ability to conduct online voice chat, but it's hardly the same.
Perhaps, but here's the corollary: people pay real money for all of the virtual goods and services in Second Life. They pay for them in Linden dollars, the virtual world's own currency, which is even indexed to the US dollar. It currently takes around 260 Linden dollars to buy a single greenback. People have made whole businesses out of creating virtual shopping malls that can then be used to sell make-believe clothes and other objects for Second Life members to play with. In 2006, Ailin Graef, who had an account in the virtual world, became the first real life millionaire in US dollars thanks to her real estate business. She started with just $10, which paid for her account.
This is not the only virtual world in which virtual goods can be generated that are then sold for real money. Online role-playing games such as Blizzard's hugely successful World of Warcraft are becoming economic generators in an industry that could be worth some $5bn in five years. Already, roughly $55m per year in real dollars is flowing through Second Life's economy. There's money in them thar virtual hills.
Danny Bradbury, MSN Tech & Gadgets
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