Advertised as vitual worlds, technologically, they’re simple 3D chatrooms but in reality they’re nothing more than a fancy launchpad for advertising.

The marketers missed out on making too much money on the MySpace/Facebook social site scene and couldn’t get it together to make any money in a real immersive virtual world (despite the fact that many one man/woman bands seem to be able to) so they’re pretending that they’re building the next big thing but are in fact going backwards by building these god awful halfway house efforts.

That way they can fleece the big corporates by quoting innovation and total control of their environment whilst pretending the humble browser is viewing the scene (when in fact, they’re pretty much secretly downloading a ‘client’ in the background anyway).

If the application is good, people don’t care if they have to download a separate client. Just look at email. Why hasn’t that been totally subsumed into the browser? It’s because whilst webmail might be handy in a fix, it’s no match for a real Email application. So why are these web based 3D worlds any better than a standalone client?

The simple fact is, nobody is going to download a 3D client simply to get bombarded with adverts, so the marketers have come up with this 2.5D crud to sneak it past the poor unsuspecting user.

but gosh, some people are still ignorant at what people can do in sl, for leaving such comments like this:

“Do you really need a second life when most people can barely manage their first life.”

and im sure those who think that virtual worlds are rubbish and is a waste of time hasn’t entirely explored its possibilities yet, or is too narrow minded to see.

evolve, people, evolve.

http://www.itsretarded.com

And no, sims cheats, ESC does not make their money allowing users to create content. It seems you’re confusing Electric Sheep with Linden Lab, creators of Second Life.

Personally, while this isn’t what I expected from ESC, I tend to think this could scratch a big itch for some companies. There are the obvious media brands (Showtime, NBC, aso) and big consumables (e.g. Coca-Cola, P&G, aso), but I could see some other players enter the arena now; especially from manufacturing. For example, Volkswagen has a strong community of enthusiasts and could probably do something pretty interesting with this. And $100K is a drop in the bucket for Apple (and might be interesting to see, considering the majority of virtual world solutions require Windows/ActiveX/IE). More importantly, from Nike to Patagonia to Hilfiger to … Threadless, I could see this being a useful service for the fashion industry. They’ve already made some serious progress in the 3D CAD/virtual PLM area this past year or so, and with all the MSM stories of people making money as Second Life fashion designers, I’m betting a few will take a shine to what ESC is offering. We’ll see.