Couldn’t help it, I mean it’s wonderful that Giorgio Armani has opened a store in Second Life and sure I’ll go check out the threads, but they’d better not cost 10,000 Lindens and really, what I really want is Gauthier! So much more Neko-like I’d say.
And in my continuing amazement at how fragmented our metaverse will become, now a Red Light district of our very own!
Forget about Amsterdam in Second Life! Now, a whole world devoted to dating, hookers, strippers, and getting down and dirty.
“When you download it and go in, you’ll find it’s very much like being in Amsterdam’s red light district,” said Ray Schwartz, president of Nightcandy, the porn site that developed Red Light World, “without having to worry about some of the strange people that gravitate to that place.”
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I had missed this previous post but thought I’d try to do some catch-up on Entropia.
Entropia Universe, the leading virtual worlds platform for interactive entertainment, community building and e-commerce using a real cash economy, boasts the Most Valuable Virtual Items and Real Estate of all the virtual worlds. The new 2008 Guinness World Records book features Club NEVERDIE, an asteroid space resort bought for $100,000 USD by famous gamer Jon NEVERDIE Jacobs as “The Most Expensive Virtual Object.” The asteroid space resort which boasts a nightclub, shopping mall, 1000 apartment complexes, commercial space ship docking, mega sports stadium, and hunting and mining biodomes is the highest grossing privately owned virtual event venue online, estimated to be worth in excess of $1 Million USD if ever placed back on the market.
The original press release was posted here.
Meanwhile, back on planet Second Life, I’ve heard anecdotal concerns that the bans on casinos, flooding of the land market, summer slow-down in user time on-line and registrants has had a marked effect on the economy.
And although Burning Life was a showcase of creativity, it was also a political mess that left gaping holes in the playa, and was the target of frequent and, to me, exasperating grief attacks.
Why wait for a future in which little mini islands of Second Life spin off into pods that are attached to MySpace or Facebook or hi5? The future is here goshdarnit!
3B.net let’s you:
The thing with 3B is that you can make it totally YOURS, it’s your unique 3D space. And 3B is incredibly easy to use, it’s simpler than uploading a photo to the web and FREE. And if you’re in the mood, you can share your 3B village with your friends. You can even create your own avatar and hang out with them virtually and wander around 3B villages, stores and cities together.
(If the above is the future me forget it!)
OK, so stating the obvious yet again: the metaverse in one sense is not one thing. The metaverse is a 3D version of the Internet. 3D displays of information and the ability to move within these spaces using personal avatars and to further share these spaces with others is headed to the commonplace.
This is starting to feel sometimes like reading back issues of the Red Herring.
In any case, the stats:
I’d like to hit on a few of the latter words in the tag for this blog - about spirituality and creativity. So I’m going to take a bit of a detour here from worrying about Google and the Lindens and talk about how I feel.
My mind can’t stay still for long so you can standby for the next comment or random rant if you prefer. We’ll be talking about branding and technology again in the morning.
But if you’d like, let’s talk about fears for a second, and hope.
Come inside, for a minute, I’d like to show you something.
One other thought and a semi amendment to my last post. Google’s social platform, currently in Beta, also seems like an obvious choice for extending the virtual worlds concept within the Google ‘product development scheme”.
Orkut promises to allow you to:
Connect with friends and family using scraps and instant messaging
Discover new people through friends of friends and communities
Share your videos, pictures, and passions all in one place
While Orkut looks a lot more like Facebook or mySpace than SL, the concept of communities and social spaces, perhaps linked at some point to Google Earth, bears watching (if Orkut hadn’t been so poorly managed, there’s a <a href=”“>wonderful overview on Wikipedia of the ups and downs).
Hey, I think a lot. I share these deep deep thoughts. These deep thoughts are pretty thin but then I’ve only been doing this for a week or so. But how come most of the comments I got, at least in world, were about the photos of my day on the town dressed up as a cracked out, blue haired, neko, um…well, whatever I was dressed up as?
OK, so a few additional photos just so it doesn’t seem like I always wander around with hypodermic needles on my belt and dead fish on my back.
