Second sight--Second Life
I have seen the future and it is Second Life. IBM has decided to invest $10 million in using the virtual world. They have already been using it for meetings, so the added money isn't a great surprise. CEO Sam Palmisano will be addressing employees next week in a virtual meeting staged on a Second Life island.
Why is this significant? Because I believe that there will be a huge migration of conventional collaborative Internet functions into these virtual worlds over the next five years. I predict that most social websites, including most of the newer ones like Youtube, Myspace and Facebook will either migrate into these worlds or die.
Expect a convergence of the online gaming world and virtual worlds.
The only thing that's missing (now that Broadband is cheap and plentiful) is a monster identity management system that cuts across each of the sites.
Posted on November 10, 2006
