Virtual worlds take over the online worlds

Is the title of an article in today's Guardian by Victor Keegan - easily the UK national journalist best informed about this space.

Despite the lack of hype around virtual worlds (yesterday's Google / Lively decision excepted), Victor Keegan points out that virtual worlds are in rude health. To paraphrase and comment on some of what he says:

• Teen world Habbo hotel is about to overtake Dungeons & Dragons style online game, World of Warcraft by having 10 million+ regular users a month

• Though it only has 700,000 users, Swedish owned Entropia is building 'planets' for entertainment brands. Entropia owner Mindark is also developing 'Dotman' for the Beijing Cyber Recreation District. A commercial world that is designed to hold millions online at one time (Second Life has a concurrency of 65k users at once), you'd imagine Mindark would be able to use this expertise to massively scale up its social worlds.

• Second Life's growth might have stalled, but it's increasingly an experimentation area for businesses, Universities, artists - and even hospitals.

• Kids worlds are seeing the growth of 'virtual natives' - children for who going into a virtual world will be second nature in 10 years time (and who might want to establish a new identity away from the hundreds of social network friends they collect). Along with Second Life, Club Penguin (a Cow client), was one of ten brands in Nielsen's list of the fastest growing sites measured by the time spent there.

• Victor Keegan mentions a German owned world, Twinity (not yet public), "which mashes virtual worlds with real cities, including New York. My avatar has an apartment in Berlin, though I have not yet figured out how to open the front door."

Finally, as we posted the other day, IBM and Second Life have successfully 'teleported' a group of avatars from one virtual world to another. That means that one day we'll be able to create a single digital persona who can move between virtual worlds - or an effective 3D Internet - at will, much as we currently move between websites.

Image - Twinity screenshot. From dangerdome.de