Second Life
From uvvy
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Life
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents. Since opening to the public in 2003, it has grown explosively and today is inhabited by millions of people (August 2006) from around the globe. Second Life is not a videogame, but a complete platform for business and entertainment. See the Second Life website.
Our directory of Interesting places in Second Life
Second Life is not yet the leading MMOG in terms of number of players and revenue, but is already the most interesting for an audience interested in the business, cultural and social potential of MMOGs. A large and growing number of companies and cultural / social organizations have discovered that establishing a presence in Second Life is a very useful support to their work.
SL can be considered as a platform where "residents" collaborate at building a Metaverse with the tools provided by the system. Residents build avatars, clothes, houses, vehicles etc., buy and sell land and designer items, and organize events. Among the most interesting events in SecondLife are the monthly SL Future Salon meetings and the Democracy Island civic space.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Second Life is an open-ended virtual world created in 2003 by San Francisco-based Linden Lab. It is similar to There, another such world created around the same time, which is, again, very open-ended. The brain-child of former RealNetworks CTO Philip Rosedale, Second Life gives its users (referred to as residents) tools to shape its world. A large majority of the content in the Second Life world is resident-created, and one of the unique things about this environment is that residents retain the intellectual property rights to the objects they create.
Second Life has its own economy and a currency, Linden dollars. Residents receive a small amount of this currency when they start their account, and a weekly stipend thereafter. The size of the stipend depends on the account type. To earn additional money, residents may sell objects or services through shops within the environment to earn Linden dollars. It is possible to convert Linden dollars to US dollars and vice versa through a real-world brokerage run by Linden Lab. The Second Life economy generates about $US 500,000 worth of economic activity per week.
Many Second Life residents have noted the similarities between Second Life and the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. This is actually a stated goal of Linden Lab - to create a user-defined world of general use in which people can interact, play, do business and otherwise communicate".
