a php developer weblog

  Besides other startups, the Red Herring top 100 most innovative companies for 2005 included a small San Francisco company called Linden Lab. With relativelly small funding, and in a short amount of time, this company has created an amazing product called Second Life. Some might call it a game, however a quick look at it reveals that it is way more than that. It's an entire alternate reality, mostly wiki-like user-generated. An infinite virtual space, completelly empty at first, that got filled up with entire cities, where virtual 3D characters interact into a matrix-like network. There's also a local currency, the Linden dollar L$, and the exchange rate to the dollar builds a bridge between SL and the first life under this open market.
Shops with live sellers that invest a lot of time in answering newbie questions, casinos, bars or race tracks; these are just a few of the scenes users managed to create. Interaction takes a completelly new turn, since anybody can re-create himself by eventually designing himself or simply purchasing skins. Compared to this, the nice yahoo messenger smileys seem like stone age. Anyway, it would suck that some big player purchases the company, since it would kill the creativity flow with some other cheap dollar-making schema.

By recently waving their basic membership fee, the company made an aggresive expansion move, and from the initial wave of curious types, expansion should settle in a steady wave of subscribers. Ideally there should be no more fees for establishing a "land ownership" somewhere on their 10k servers farm, and with so much creativity involved, some better business idea should come up. Linden Labs is already on the right track, with attractive developer plans, so that work in this virtual universe is rewarded.