Re invite-only beta: the first readers (that was originally Techcrunch readers) to send a request to
techcrunch@smallworlds.com will get an invite within the next 12 hours. Mine is sent - I just have received following in the mail:

Congratulations - you are one of the first 1,000 Techcrunch readers to
register for the SmallWorlds beta.

We’ll get back to you within 24 hours with your personal invite for
immediate access to SmallWorlds.
Regards

SmallWorlds Team

Get yours now!

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Virtual worlds like Second Life – which has almost 9m registered users - are essentially an extension of chatrooms, but provide a content-rich environment, immersing the user in a three-dimensional interactive world and enabling recruiters to interact far more holistically with candidates.

Second Life is one of many virtual world platforms, but the key to success is running and promoting the session as you would a live event, to a targeted audience: “Just as you wouldn’t turn up in a town square and start targeting passers-by to come and work for you, it is important that your ‘event’ is in the right space and aimed at and promoted to your target audience.”

James Bowmer, country manager of Kelly Services, says: “Second Life provides us a platform to communicate globally with customers and job seekers using interactive relationships.”

Matthew Whitbourne, senior inventor at IBM, which has been using virtual worlds in recruitment for 18 months, agrees, claiming that virtual worlds “allow IBM to engage with candidates and talk about careers in a unique and powerful way”.

IBM uses virtual worlds as an extension of its existing recruitment efforts, hosting pre-scheduled events on Second Life and inviting specified groups of graduates to meet hiring managers, experts and senior business figures in this space, and talk about their careers.

The use of virtual worlds as a recruitment tool has been much hyped of late – TMP hosted the UK’s first ever ‘virtual world’ careers fair last year; Kelly Services launched its own island in Second Life; and GCHQ, the government intelligence organisation, has been advertising in online gaming to tempt web-savvy graduates to become spies.

But how is it possible and what does it mean to use virtual worlds as a recruitment tool? Is this wave of technology really going to dwarf social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace? Is it merely an over-hyped media gimmick or the next evolution of the web?

“The key benefit to going virtual is that employers can afford to encourage their managers to spend time networking with potential candidates.”

To the less technologically savvy, the idea that virtual worlds could be used as a recruitment platform may seem a strange and surreal proposition restricted to the realm of the computer geek, but employers – including RBS, Yell, KPMG and IBM – are discovering that it can be a highly effective medium to interact with candidates.

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As a communication tool between users, there are unique chat features such as “Area Chat” which enables users to chat with people around themselves, and “Dual Chat” that permits a one-on-one chat by using their own avatars. And the “Dual Chat” feature, using 3D avatars, makes it possible to control actions and expressions, permitting more emotional appeals than text-only messages.

The PC-based service “Second Life” can only accept a limited number of simultaneous users, but the Android version of 3D virtual world content allows a maximun 400 people to simultaneously access a virtual town within the service.

Eitarosoft, inc. announced that they have successfully developed a 3D virtual world service on Google’s platform “Android”. The conventional 3D virtual world service required the use of a very high-specific PC, but Android-mounted mobile devices will enable users to enjoy the 3D virtual world service with commonly available PCs because of the mobility and accessibility.

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The Web Site has a virtual character that goes by the name Mr. Tangee, the orangutan that runs the ice-cream van. If the residents “buy” an ice-cream they in turn get a chance to learn more about the product.

In an attempt to encourage human residents to live in sync with nature, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has set up a virtual island named “Conservation Island” in an Internet-based virtual world Second Life.

The site goes on to explain how the soy and palm oil is found in everyday products, from ice-cream to cosmetics and chocolate bars thus threatening ” not only some of the world’s greatest forests and traditional lifestyles, but also endangered species such as orangutans and jaguars,” the site explains.

According to a press release, the visitors to another part of the island on the Web site can befriend a panda who will tell them about environmental issues. It also explains the benefits of renewable sources of energy by a town powered by a wind-powered pinwheel.

AFP quotes WWF’s David Cole as saying, “WWF set up the island as a way to help people learn about conservation issues and the need to live sustainably.”

“We want to be able to show people that WWF has solutions to the real environmental issues affecting their ‘first life’,” he added.

Launched in 2003 and developed by Linden Research, Inc. (commonly referred to as Linden Lab), Second Life came to international attention via mainstream news media in late 2006 and early 2007.

A downloadable client program called the Second Life Viewer enables its users, called “Residents,” to interact with each other through motional avatars, providing an advanced level of a social network service combined with general aspects of a metaverse.

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For what it is worth, here’s my prediction:

In the next 3-9 months, at least two major players (Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc.), in addition to Sony Home, will launch their own virtual worlds to compete with Second Life. They will differ from one another, but each will be a walled garden in the sense that they will not interoperate with one another or other worlds. Before we venture too much farther down this rabbit hole, let me digress for a moment and propose a strawman taxonomy even though one or more probably already exist. First, lets break virtual worlds into a biological order:

(This is my first attempt at capturing this graphically, and it will be evolving, so bear with me)

Lets dispense with the formalities with regards to Walled Gardens vs. Open Network. Incumbents (Linden, Entropia) would argue that their system is open in that it is open source (Linden) or interoperable between worlds within their own proprietary software domain (Entropia). In contrast, when I say something is open, I mean open in the same way that I can take this browser, open a tab, and go to Wells Fargo and bank, and simultaneously go to Amazon.com and shop. There are standards that web developers conform to so a wide range of browsers can access their content.

What is needed is a browser-like approach to virtual worlds, where I can walk my avatar from the Black Sun to Amazon to Wells Fargo and retain my avatar, revenue balance, virtual home, and so forth. Ideally, these sites (Amazon, Wells, Black Sun) would be hosted wherever the respective organizations damn well please, rather than being restricted to a specific location or administered by one for-profit company. An Internet model. And no geographic dependencies so you don’t have to worry about sovereign nations projecting their will into the governance or economy.

What we have today is akin to what we had with BBS’, and then walled garden providers like The Source, Prodigy, Compuserve, and America Online with proprietary software to access their services. They had specific companies (Sabre) hang out shingles in their administrative domain, so a Compuserve subscriber could access Sabre’s travel reservation system, but those people on Prodigy had to use some other travel service (unless Sabre spent the money to be in multiple walled gardens, which is rarely cost effective).

Right now, I can go to AOL (oh, the irony), Sony, IBM, and a few others within the domain of Second Life. I can go to the excellent Stanford State of Play Academy lectures in There.com, and (if they don’t deem me a sexual predator) go socialize with teenagers in Virtual Laguna Beach. What I can’t do is move one avatar that I have invested my time into between these worlds. (And lets stop calling them worlds, which sounds horribly outdated, and use something more esoteric like ”verses’ (short for ‘metaverses’ or ‘universes’)). To sum up, lets define an attribute of an open network as Avatar Portability between ‘verses.

Meanwhile, today, we are just starting the Source/Prodigy/Compuserve/AOL feudal struggles in virtual worlds. Venture money is flowing into new companies making virtual worlds, and large companies are smelling blood in the water as well. As usual, successful early entrants will attempt to fortify their position as much as possible against new competitors (FairPlay anyone?) and there will be some messy consolidation and attrition as the market develops. During this time, the underfunded startups and early casualties will start agitating for open standards between worlds.

Reuben Steiger, the CEO of Millions of Us, refers to this as a ‘Las Vegas Monorail’ event. His premise is that the only people who wanted the monorail were the casinos that had less customers than they wanted, whereas the successful casinos had no incentive to give people a way out of their casino, so therefore did not support the monorail. This sounds like AOL/MSN/Yahoo IM interoperability hopes to me.

Having been the successful early entrant in some markets, and the late entrant in others, I regularly play both of these cards shamelessly. If I am first to market, then I rationalize my proprietary walled garden system by saying that there is no standard to support and the customers demand certain functionality now, not five years from now when some greybeards in the standards bodies can agree on the proper sentence structure and obscure acronym for the already-obsolete standard. When I am late to market, I will gleefully tell the market that they are being overcharged by these horrible outdated proprietary systems (like PBXs) and could save money with an open, competitive market (like voice over IP).

As was the case with voice over IP, there is an additional variable in the equation in that there are two markets instead of just one, the service provider/consumer market, and the enterprise market. In this case, an enterprise ‘verse would simply be a ‘verse for use within a company to allow it’s employees and partners collaborate better together, whereas a consumer ‘verse would be what we think of now with Second Life or There.com. There will be another juncture (and blogpost) about when we need to cross-the-streams between enterprise and consumer ‘verses, but I’ll save that one for another day.

In the meanwhile, my prediction can be summarized as follows:

1) T=Now. One major vendor, few minor, both walled gardens. (Note: the recent disruptive major walled garden event with China and Entropia is a game-changer and also a future blogpost).

2) T= This time next year. Three or Four major ‘verses competing for customers with status/infrastructure innovation (”Transfer your avatar and property to our world for free from Second Life when you join, no charge!” (American and United regularly do this with frequent travelers)). Voice is common, and the ‘verse developers have finally figured out that the utility of their ‘verse is directly effected by the amount of other data sources they can integrate into their environment (Note: RSS is a fine start, but it’s a .0001 on a 10 scale). Worldwide adoption of virtual environments as a dominant Internet tool is still <1%.

3) T = 3-5 years from now. Consolidation and attrition has taken it’s toll, and the 20 balkanized ‘verses are down to 2-3 major choices. The clamor from customers for standards is getting loud enough to bear mention in stockholder meetings. Adoption is close to 20% (sorry Gartner).

4) T = 5-7 years from now. There is a rich immersive standard with avatar portability, with the major vendors still misbehaving with ‘proprietary extensions’ to the standard, and we look back and smile at the naive nature of the walled garden ‘verses of years past. Adoption is >50%.

In retrospect, I should divide this up into about half a dozen blogposts, as there’s a lot more to be said here.

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Millions of people have logged on to Second Life, an internet craze that allows a user to create an online alter ego.

But researchers from the University of Nottingham claim that bullying, known in cyberspace as griefing, is as big a problem in the virtual world as is in the real world.

Dr Iain Coyne, who helped carry out a study of bullying in Second Life, said: “Similar to bullying at school and work, power is a key factor in griefing. In Second Life it appears that the power imbalance between a griefer and a target is focused on knowledge and experience.

“A new resident, or newbie, may be targeted because of their naivety and inability to stop the griefing. As one participant put it, information is power, experience matters.”

Dr Coyne, along with Dr Thomas Chesney, was given permission by Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life, to set up a cyber-based focus group to discuss bullying within the virtual environment.

They rented a plot of virtual land and interviewed 50 residents, known as avatars, about their experiences. Their responses were monitored by real psychologists.

They found that newcomers are often subjected to griefing when they first enter the domain in which people communicate through instant messaging.

Some reported being attacked when moving to a new area within the Second Life world. Others claimed their virtual homes had been destroyed and they had been shot at.

The team believes bullying in the Second Life world, which so far has around 6.8 million residents, can impact on real life.

Professor Christine Ennew, who helped fund the project, said: “Cyber-bullying is on the increase and is one example of the many dysfunctional ways in which individuals use the internet.”

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Seattle, WA (PRWEB) June 1, 2007 –

Entropia to Create Mammoth Virtual World

MindArk, makers of Entropia Universe along with the Beijing Municipal People’s Government supported online entertainment company Cyber Recreation Development Corp. (CRD) announced a deal to create a Real Cash Economy virtual world for China today. In the deal aimed at permitting up to “7 million concurrent users” and generating “over $1 billion annually in commerce” it is clear the Chinese and Swedish partners have some lofty goals in mind.

According to the Press Release, “The technology introduced with this project will enable other companies within media, film, music and gaming industries, or other content providers, to acquire their own planet within Entropia Universe. In turn, this will provide a diverse, entertaining and interesting three-dimensional virtual universe of vast proportions for participants to explore. A number of the world’s largest corporations within the aforementioned business sectors are currently in negotiations to purchase their own planet within Entropia Universe.”

With Entropia currently having one Planet and a rather generously estimated 10 thousand concurrent users, this project is grand indeed. The ramifications here, should everything come to fruition as designed are cataclysmic. Seems like those exclusive two year bank licenses might pay off after all.

Reportedly, MindArk and Entropia Universe beat our other bidders, most notably Second Life for this grand partnership.

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View the Habbo Hotel Screen Shot Gallery
Habbo Hotel is a virtual world for teens, created by a company in Finland called Sulake Labs. This busy site uses a hotel metaphor as its theme complete with a “lobby” gateway and private “guest rooms.” The hotels are often so busy it can take a few tries to get into the main rooms, but there are always a plenty of guest rooms to choose from as well.

Guest rooms can be decorated with furniture (or “furni” as Habbos call it) purchased with “Habbo credits.” Habbo credits can be purchased with several types of RL currency (UK Pounds sterling, euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars, and Australian dollars) in a wide variety of ways (credit card, mobile phone, prepaid stored value cards). Furni may set you back a few credits, but access to the world itself is free and relatively easy to navigate. Cool new additions to the Habbo catalogue include pets and pet accessories.

The main URL (www.habbohotel.com) points to the U.S. version of Habbo Hotel, but Habbo is an international phenomenon with several other versions of the Hotel for residents of 16 countries, including the United Kingdom, Finland, Japan, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, and Sweden.

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By JAMES H. BURNETT III

McClatchy Newspapers

On Earth, Jared Freedman is not a member of a Masonic Lodge.

But in the metaverse, the rapidly expanding universe of virtual worlds springing up on the Internet, Freedman’s avatar, a three-dimensional graphical representation of him named Ancient Shriner, is leader of a virtual Masonic lodge.

Gone are the days when the only people who hung out in computer-generated fantasy worlds were characters in “The Matrix” and lonely kids who couldn’t get dates.

We’re talking real people spending real money to lead alternate lives in Internet-based communities as avatars who move and talk in real time.

Among the most popular virtual worlds: Second Life, which has about 6.2 million residents; There (There.com), which has about 750,000; Whyville (Whyville.com), with 2.27 million, and Habbo Hotel (Habbo.com), which has about 50 million worldwide.

“There are tens of millions of people worldwide who live in virtual worlds and take them very seriously as a new means of entertainment, communication and social interaction,” says Beth Coleman, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of comparative media studies who is writing a book on virtual worlds and their occupants.

“The biggest difference in this and the kids 10 or 15 years ago who played fantasy role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, and, later, the people who engaged in multiplayer online role-playing games, is you can’t really characterize current users as geeks or loners. These are people with lives, real friends.”

Freedman, 40, a software developer in Surfside, Fla., discovered Second Life in fall 2005. After scrutinizing the site for a few months, he registered and moved in. His first order of business: Create an avatar.

Freedman, bearded with short, curly black hair, is five-foot-eight and 180 pounds. Ancient Shriner stands a skinny six feet.

“Different, huh?” Freedman asks. “You create avatars to represent a part of you, and that part might not have anything to do with your actual appearance. In my case, my grandfather was a 33rd-degree Mason. … He sort of looked like Uncle Sam. So I designed my avatar to look like them … and I came up with that handle of Ancient Shriner.”

While most of the other Second Lifers Freedman/Ancient Shriner met were building virtual homes and acquiring virtual clothes and accessories for their avatars, Freedman built Second Life’s first Masonic lodge.

Michael Cai, a Web technology analyst with Parks Associates in Dallas, says the virtual world population has been booming for about two years.

Cai, who describes virtual worlds as the convergence of old-fashioned chatrooms, networking sites like MySpace.com and games like World of Warcraft, says their attraction is the ability to create an almost fully functional avatar.

Still, as Freedman illustrates, avatars don’t always look like their creators.

A recent survey of 9,529 Second Lifers by Seattle-based Global Market Insite, found that 45 percent give their avatars more attractive bodies, 37 percent make them younger than themselves and 23 percent give them another race.

The transformation isn’t so drastic for Caridad Jorge, 24, a Miami real-estate coordinator, but she understands the temptation to alter one’s look, because “it’s a game. You make yourself look the way you want.” Jorge is five-foot-five and fair, with dark brown hair. In There.com, her avatar Coralline is tan, taller and slimmer.

Coralline plays virtual spades at other avatars’ virtual houses and goes on scavenger hunts that take her to virtual versions of Paris and the Pyramids.

“I’ve never wanted to build a house in There,” Jorge says. “For me, this was a way to really go somewhere else and do things and visit places I might never have time or money for in the real world.”

MIT’s Coleman says that until a few years ago, most virtual-world residents were the same folks playing fantasy games, so their avatars were “very fantastical.”

“But the trend has been toward more realistic representations,” she says, “because more people are now trying to escape not who they are – what they look like, I mean – but where they spend their time.”

Twenty-two percent of Second Lifers polled by GMI said they had more virtual-world than real-world friends, and 29 percent said their virtual lives interfered with their real lives.

And even though a meaningful virtual-world life requires a lot of time, Coleman says she doesn’t believe it carries the addiction danger of virtual multiplayer games, because simply living online isn’t competitive.

One newer benefit of virtual living is money. “There is a great deal to be made,” says Jay Yarbrough, who lives near Tampa.

“I joined There.com in February 2004. … My avatar Thumdar has made lots of friends and goes interesting places. We even started a Web site within the virtual world, Thumdar.com, that studies what goes on in There. But what I found was as many people were becoming interested in virtual worlds, not many had the technical savvy to fully develop the avatars they wanted.”

Yarbrough/Thumdar began meeting others who wanted their avatars to have 3D cars with all the trimmings and virtual hot tubs with virtual flat-screen TVs.

Thinking “Pimp my avatar,” Yarbrough offered his “techspertise” and was quickly making a nice side income, he says, adding he knows other techies who earn $100,000-plus giving avatar upgrades.

Michael Wilson, CEO of Makena Technologies and one of the creators of eBay, says the virtual world is a gold mine, but most don’t want to make money.

“They just want something to do,” says Wilson, whose company created There.com and developed Virtual Hills and Virtual Laguna Beach for MTV for fans who wanted to sample life on the reality shows “The Hills” and “Laguna Beach.”

“People simply want to meet each other and have their digital images, their avatars, be able to do the same things they might in the real world,” Wilson says.

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I was fascinated to watch Home being dismissed by one of the editors on the 1UP show, a brilliant video podcast on gaming. The 1UP show is a delight: a well written, cleverly crafted, funny and entertaining soap opera that wittily frames excellent video game reviews within amusing vignettes and scenes about the games-mad twentysomethings who are livin’ the dream as full-time games reviewers in the US. They’re young, hip, and in San Francisco, and have all the appropriate geek obsessions: relentlessly informed and passionate about games, in a world in which people stage interventions because you’ve not been playing World of Warcraft enough.

In the latest episode one of the characters in the show is extremely dismissive of Sony’s Home. There is nothing exciting or glamorous to her about these unimpressive “mall wandering douche bags” she has seen in the demo footage. In fact, she says, “If I saw these people in real life I would walk the other way.” This made me want to wave my hands about in frustration. Of course she feels that way: she’s got one of the hippest gigs in town, and the world that Sony is offering in Home couldn’t be more vanilla or boring to her. It’s as tragic in its way as that image of the fake Nike sneakers or the forlorn excitement of the Ford Aspire, a fantasy of unironic suburban cool. But to a teenager in Japan, or China, or Eastern Germany, or Russia, or Penrith for that matter, Home may end up representing everything that is sharp and exciting and engaging about truth, justice and the American way: a chance to turn into one of the characters on The O.C., if only virtually, for a few hours a night, in the privacy of your bedroom or at a desk in an internet café.

There’s a kind of virtual consumption involved in writing Nike on your no-name sneakers – you can’t have the thing, but you do your best to manifest the notion or idea of the thing. Virtual worlds like Home and MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach may enable people who can’t afford the experience of being hip young Californians or wealthy suburban teenagers to get some virtual real estate in the empire of cool – to write Nike on their sneakers, if you will. There will be teething problems and technical issues, it will bump along and nobody will notice for a while, but my guess is eventually Sony or someone else will figure it out, on a shocking, massive, global scale.

At this point these platforms will become hugely important as a way for teenagers all over the world to participate in the American fantasy life at a fraction of the cost of the real thing. We all know that the world doesn’t have enough resources to allow everyone to pimp their own ride or grab their own condo, but it only costs a few cents to enable people to pimp a virtual ride or build a virtual condo. The rich and the spoiled in the West won’t see this coming: we’re too distracted by our real toys to see the deep hunger in the world, a hunger that perhaps only virtual toys will be able to satisfy. It may be sad, or it may be ironic: but think for a moment about Sony’s language here. The company is offering the children of the world a virtual Home, and it is one that will ultimately exist to define them by their consumption. Is that really the kind of home we want them to dwell in?

Cited from Times Online.

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