Second Life Opens Public Beta

thehossman writes "A friend of mine works for Linden Lab, and for the past few months he's been hyping their upcoming product: Second Life. I've just been nodding my head, and ignoring him, but last week he logged in and gave me a mini-tour of the VR world (and some things their alpha-testers have helped create) and I was blown away. Now they've announced their public beta, and if you've got a machine that can handle it, I highly advise you to check it out." This is another of the lifestyle-focused massively multiplayer titles that seem to have very big (venture capital?) budgets backing them - can they succeed?

Comments

credit card number?

[kLaNk]

They require a credit card number to sign up for an open beta? That seems a bit extreme if you ask me. There are other ways of making sure that your users are unique without requiring everybody to trust you with your credit card number!

Second Life, First Girlfriend? Last Job?

[Nathan Ramella]

Why is it nobody has harnessed the MMORPG model to get humans to do something useful. Like parsing, culling data or inputting data to get 'money' in the game.
If somebody would just come up with the right setup, they could get the 'Matrix' harness developed to use people as the engine for their business model.

Marketing people could test new music out in Virtual 'Bars' to see what people like, You could capture all the conversations and find out who's drinking coke and who's drinking pepsi..

And the instant gratification as you talk to someone in a virtual bar and a passer-by auspiciously mentions that the new poster on the wall can be purchased online at the following URL..
-n