I’ve been meaning to try out Second Life for a few months now and have been resisting, largely because it sounds waaay too addictive. I finally broke down and tried it yesterday and, indeed, it’s a fascinating experience.
Heaps of people (over 100,000 users) have created land, buildings, clothing and other objects within a 3D virtual world. The environment is scriptable, and people have even invented games. You can walk or fly around, interact with all of these things and the avatars of other people, and buy and sell items using “Linden” currency. Linden currency can in turn be bought with real US dollars, and when I checked the site a few days back the front page said something like $239,000 US dollars were spent within the world that single day. (!) There are apparently currency exchanges and all sorts of markets for Second Life goods and services, both within and outside of the environment.

Second Life is starting to gain notoriety and hit mainstream media. Wired just published a brief article titled Avatars Among Us, for instance, in which they point out that it’s becoming hip for celebrity techies to make cameo SL appearances. Douglas Engelbart (inventor of the computer mouse), Lawrence Lessig (of Creative Commons) and Cory Doctorow have all visited recently, Engelbart for a speech, and Lessig and Doctorow both promoting their books.

I’m curious to see how much of the real world (including the “regular” Web) gets reflected in Second Life. I stumbled across an ad for a Cancer charity event, for instance. And plenty of porn, which is always strong validation that a real economy is emerging. I’m told if you create intellectual property within Second Life, you get to keep ownership rights; that must encourage creativity and sharing. And I’m sure sooner or later someone will want to regulate the currency exchange and market aspects of it, if that hasn’t already happened, and set up larger scale businesses (ebay.secondlife.com? ingdirect.secondlife.com? The mind boggles.) Let’s just hope governments don’t notice and hop in with a Second Life version of income tax.

[Images from secondlife.com]