Second Life is unquestionably the hot thing right now. My apologies to MySpace, YouTube (or Gootube), AJAX, video, RSS, et. al., but Second Life is now the hot topic of the day. If you don’t know about Second Life yet check out the Wikipedia definition. In the broadest sense its a 3-D virtual world that allows users to create avatars (residents as defined by Second Life) and pretty much do whatever they want to within the confines of the Second Life universe. So why is this important? How about some quick facts:

• There are over 1.3 million registered users
• The average age of the users is 32
• There is over $500,000 a DAY spent in US dollars in Second Life
• Major brands are creating a presence there including Nike, Adidas, Disney and GM

IBM is holding corporate meetings in-world (the term for happenings within Second Life) to allow their teams from around the world to collaborate through avatar-based interactions. And oh yeah, they intend to spend $10 million over the next year building out communication tactics within Second Life.

Starwood hotels launched their new hotel, aloft, within Second Life to allow people to experience the hotel before its real world efforts are complete.

Dell is announcing this morning at 10:15 PST that they are going to be launching a presense within Second Life. In the words of Boston Red Sox fans everywhere, “its about time”.

So what does all this mean? Well, whether Second Life is going to continue to be the leader in the space, I personally think virtual worlds are here to stay and are only going to grow over the next several years. Second Life right now is way too clunky, slow and limited in many ways. They have stated that they will be allowing API’s to be connected to their environment soon and there was even a leak that they let one of the interactive agencies that specializes in development in virtual worlds get a head start on developing their own interface. So the application should improve once it is more of an open source platform.

The continued growth of broadband has allowed video to become more practical on the web. Users have been given a taste of control and limited constraints and they are running with it. The web is becoming far more of a collaborative, interaction-based medium on a daily basis. What I think we’ll see in the next evolution online will be a virtual world environment that becomes much more like the real world. Why should MLB create a virtual stadium with humorous bobblehead type players when they can use video and enhanced imaging to “create” an exact replica of Yankee Stadium in a virtual world environment with the players we see on TV interacting with you? The console games today such as Madden are getting close to reaching this point and I can see the future being the merging of video and virtual worlds to a point where being online or in-world is as close to reality as you can get. Second Life is changing the game as we know it and it should be fun to see how it all plays out.