Opinion: It's looking more and more probable that major businesses will start to gain traction entirely in the "virtual" world.Every once in a while during my career on the Internet, I get what I like to call a "zeitgeist tingle," an indescribable feeling when the virtual stars are starting to align and we're on the cusp of some major change.
I'm not going to say I'm perfect at predicting major trends, but there are those times when things start to click into place. I think we're close to one of those times now. Why? Because the world seems to starting to understand that the real power of the Internet isn't necessarily the fact that it can provide information about just about anything to anyone anywhere, but that it's about connecting people together. And the implications of that realization may be a lot farther reaching than we think: we may be on the cusp of the virtual world becoming just as "real" as the "real world."
As usual, there are signs of weirdness everywhere: Yahoo trying to communicate with aliens. Google going solar. Atari-creator Nolan Bushnell finally launching his line of video-game-themed restaurants. But what's really been getting my attention isn't what's going on in the real world as much as what's going on in the rapidly-growing Metaverse of online virtual worlds.
The whole commercialization of Second Life has been going on for a while now. And while its gotten more than its fair share of media attention, it wasn't all that fascinating to me until Reuters decided that it was going to set up shop in the virtual community, not only putting up an obligatory building, but assigning a reporter to cover Second Life and SL businesses full time.
Yeah. Full time. It's hard not to admit that it's pretty amazing when a solidly staid news service like Reuters decides that there's enough going on in the virtual world that it needs a foreign correspondent to cover the action.
Of course, when you look at the bigger picture, it starts to make sense. The BBC has reported that the online economy now has the same impact as Nambibia, though that figure has come under some debate. But even with the debate, the economic fluctuations in the not-so-"real" world have real-world impacts: as World of Warcraft players found out when the service suddenly took 11 million gold pieces out of circulation, a move which added up to almost $2 million in real-world losses to real world players.
Of course, people are making real money, too. There have been reports of "virtual sweatshops" using underpaid players to build up characters to sell. Club Neverdie was born when its creator sunk $100,000 real dollars in to online world Project Entropia to build and develop a virtual space station on the service. Author Julian Dibbell just published a book about the year he spent earning a (real life) living buying and selling objects in video games.
While the actual numbers and demographic makeup of those occupying the metaverse are somewhat debatable, there's no question that they're growing. And this growth in online virtual worlds (games and communities included) mirrors the explosive growth of the social networking sphere, an industry segment that's obviously gotten a big shot in the arm from Google's acquisition of YouTube as well as Yahoo's interest in Facebook (to the tune of $1 billion) and Bertlesmann's new interest in sinking megabucks into creating a MySpace competitor.
While some seem to think this growth is the beginning of yet another dotcom bubble or the beginnings of "Bubble2.0", I don't really think so, especially when you look at the overall trends for using the Internet for collaboration and interpersonal communication. So called "Office 2.0" apps aren't notable because they're online, but because they take advantage of the medium to allow users to work anywhere and (more importantly, I'd add) collaborate seamlessly. Is it really such a jump to move from Google Docs & Spreadsheets to creating a virtual business center online for your clients to gather from around the globe? Is it that much of a stretch to move from Web pages to roll-your-own social networking apps as a way of doing business online? I don't think so.
Whether or not the virtual world is ready to declare its independence from the real world (as John Perry Barlow declared way back in 1996) might not be something that all of us have to worry about at this point, as Web business people, we do need to start looking at what becomes possible once the virtual world starts to supplant the "real" world when it comes to commerce, online transactions, interactions, and how we do business.
Considering how things are going, it's looking more and more probably that major businesses will start to gain traction entirely in the "virtual" world (past failures aside) and more and more formerly face-to-face communication becomes avatar-to-avatar communication.
Sound far-fetched? So did the the transformative effects of the Web back in the late 80's and early 90's. Today it's hard to imagine life without it. It may be time to start imagining what you're going to do with your virtual life in the coming decade.
Online Media 
