Second Life meets Wikipedia

Linden Labs has gone and open sourced their Second Life client software. Michael Arrington asks whether they’ve gone far enough –

At current growth trends, SL could be a real economic force in a few years. When things really start to hop, SL will look more like it’s own private Internet. Or a privately held virtual nation. At the point that millions of people spend most or all of their waking hours within the SL world, we’ll know this has happened.I think people (and governments) will start to get a little nervous at that point. It will be impossible for SL to put both its shareholders and users first, and history suggests that users will get the shaft. I can image the most bizarre anti-trust lawsuits in history being fought in courtrooms around the world.What might make more sense in the long run is more of a Wikipedia-like approach to Second Life. A non profit organization running open source software where people can add their own island just by plugging in a server in their living room or the hosting provider of their choice. Whoever builds that and provides a serious alternative to the SL experience could help the world at least as much as Wikipedia has.An interesting take, Michael. Certainly one to be taken seriously.

What we need to be cognizant of is the fact that SL is not about to upset the status quo and allow anyone to plug in a server and create their own real estate in world. This would cause a major issue with SL residents who have invested time and money to build up a real estate portfolio.

So SL has only open sourced its client software, not the actual grid. This means that their viewer is now open source under the GNU Public License, but their underlying infrastructure remains proprietary.

Hightechwire: Venture Wrap

The latest venture funding activity includes:

* Heavy.com, an online video site for 18-34 year old males, which has closed a $20m financing from Polaris Venture Partners. The funding (which comes on top of $10m provided by Polaris in early 2006) will be used to expand Heavy’s network internationally. According to Mike Hirshland, a partner at Polaris, “Heavy is building a true 21st century media company, which combines internally developed content with great consumer generated content and with a sustainable revenue model. As advertisers expand their online video budgets in 2007, they are looking to work with the few online brands that can effectively deliver audience in scale.”

* With technology developed in Israel, San Francisco based Amobee has developed a telco grade adserving solution for mobile operators, which enables them to ad-fund non-voice related apps and services. The company has raised further funding from Sequoia and Accel (they raised $5m in 2005).

On the M&A side, Colorado-based Digitalglobe, which provides high resolution commercial satellite imagery and geospatial information products has acquired GlobeXplorer, a geographic data integration and publishing company from Stewart REI. GlobeXplorer’s web-based search and delivery apps will augment Digitalglobe’s Quickbird satellite system. The company’s images power GoogleEarth and they anticipate launching two new satellites in 07/08.

Online Teens Embrace Social Networking

Over at Techcraunch we blogged about teen social networking site Piczo earlier. Following on from that we note that according to a report released today by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, more that half of American teens between 12 – 17 years of age use social networking websites.

The report, which is titled Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview and can be found here, notes that socnet sites have rocketed from a niche activity into a phenomenon that engages tens of millions of Internet users.

There is no surprise in the finding that MySpace dominates the social networking world with some 85% of teens who have created an online profile saying they use or update most often on this site. 

An interesting point is that there is a preference amongst boys to use MySpace and amongst girls to use Facebook. It would seem that boys prefer the anything goes free flowing nature of MySpace, which has loose age restrictions and on which users can create whatever type of profile and network they choose.

While Facebook has a more closed, restrictive system, for example users are encouraged to register with their real name and must be verified by other high school students to be allowed to register as part of that school’s community.

It would seem the older hunter/gatherer mentality is alive and well amongst US teens.