Thursday, October 11, 2007

Second Life still on top at Virtual Worlds conference

I just completed two days at the Virtual Worlds conference in San Jose, which I was covering for CNET News.com, and I am utterly worn out.

But before I fall down in a heap, I thought it was worth a quick post to comment on just how much Second Life still dominates this industry.

At so many past virtual world-related events I've been to, Linden Lab has absolutely over-saturated everyone with its marketing efforts. This time around, it seemed to have gone the opposite direction, with almost no marketing and only one or two panelists.

Yet, everywhere you looked, people were talking about Second Life, Second Life, Second Life.

Maybe they were comparing their virtual worlds to SL, or maybe they were developing projects for it. Either way, it was still on everyone's lips.

And since one of my goals at the conference was to talk up my book, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Second Life, which comes out next month, it was great to see that people are still very, very interested in SL.

Among the very cool things I saw at the show were inDuality, a browser-based front-end that lets users move between virtual worlds, and Movable Life, a light browser-based Second Life client that lets you chat and move around SL from any browser.

Anyway, the conference was a nice surprise after the spring version in New York, which I felt was kind of unimpressive. But here, everyone seemed to be excited about the subject, and that's a very nice thing to see.

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