7 Reasons Second Life Matters to Business

[Kristijntje]

7 - Scalable to the entire world: Last January, Linden open-sourced its client code, and from this flowered a variety of alternate access portals into SL, including Wii controllers, cell phones, and thanks to a 15-year-old female hacker, the web itself. This makes SL a lead contender to become a universally accessible mirror world, where all our physical data is modeled in a dynamic network, an inconceivably valuable resource for scientists, governments, corporations, and beyond. Linden’s stated intentions to open-source their servers would make this outcome even more probable, while transforming the Net itself into a 3D medium.

That’s just the beginning. Many futurists envision a time when 3D printers will supplant or enhance much of our traditional modes of production. Impressive trial runs are already being conducted in Second Life, exporting avatars and other content into the real world — early glimpses, perhaps, of a time when most of our real world goods are developed and produced in the metaverse....

full article: http://gigaom.com/2007/09/26/7-reasons-w...xecutives/