• Financial Times, Wednesday, October 10, 2007 12 PM

IBM and Second Life creator Linden Lab are teaming up to create "universal avatars" that let patrons of virtual worlds move from one to another using the same identity. An interesting vision, to be sure, but a "borderless" virtual world society presents all kinds of data integration problems--of course, this is where IBM comes in. The integration of identities also calls for standards to be developed to allow for things like secure business transactions and porting business and personal data over from one world to another. More than 20 virtual world companies met in San Francisco earlier this week to begin the process of creating these standards, according to the Financial Times.

"This is a natural and powerful collaboration," said Colin Parris, vice president of Digital Convergence at IBM. "There is a lot of business value being derived from these worlds. With interoperability and integration, that value would expand tenfold."

IBM and Linden Lab obviously see a big future for commerce in virtual worlds like Second Life and Gaia Online. However, Second Life is one of the few to establish a substantial virtual economy, and worldwide usage of the site remains sparse. The integration of several virtual worlds into one--which is ultimately what the companies are after--could change that, although it would be interesting to see how the collective demographics of these worlds break down. What we have here is another opening of formerly closed networks, kind of like what's happening with social networking. Could this lead to an explosion of interest in virtual worlds?

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