Second Life Redux

One of my best friends works for Linden Labs, the company behind Q107’s media darling Second Life. For those of you who haven’t heard, Second Life is essentially the Metaverse as visualized by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, a completely virtual world where people can create a live whatever they want. Always a neat idea for hackers, but like most technology, the initial usages revolved around geeks and porn.

I’m excited to see this start changing though, as I knew it would when they added voice capabilities. Now the world would go from being IRC with avatars to a real virtual world where people could interact more naturally.

I was particularly happy to see this post on the every-influential TechCrunch talking about the greater utility of the virtual world, and reversing their previous stance “that this year Second Life has provided a range of tabloid fodder that we’ve seen fit to print”.

Go Linden, here’s hoping you figure out a business model that will at least let you stay alive, if not make the extremely passionate people who have built this amazing technology at least somewhat rich.

Update 10/14/07: Someone pointed out that it was Neal Stephenson, not William Gibson who wrote Snow Crash…do’oh!