Another (Early) Wave

A World Unto Itself

Tuesday, March 7, 5:05 p.m. ET: A demo of a fast-growing virtual world called "Second Life" grabbed attention here. This immersive online community has more than 150,000 residents, nearly half of whom have been active in the past 30 days. Created by Linden Labs, Second Life is built and owned by its members, who buy and sell virtual stuff from each other.

Linden Lab vice president Cory Ondrejka said Second Life residents have exchanged $800,000 worth of goods just in the last 30 days, including 240,000 distinct virtual objects. Residents also sent one another 75 million instant messages in the same time period.

Ondrejka said academics have used Second Life for researching schizophrenia by creating "virtual hallucinations" and developers have created games there that have turned into big hits with members, including one that is about to hop into the real world as a Nintendo Gameboy game.

I found the demographics fascinating -- fully half of Second Life's activity is by women, who are slightly outnumbered by men but are more active, according to Ondrejka. Oh, did I mention it's free to participate? No subscription required, but if you get addicted, better hang into you wallet.

Making It Hip to Clip

Tuesday, March 7, 2:52 p.m. ET: Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's chief technical officer, showed an intriguing new "clipboard" software tool for copying and pasting info between Web sites.

The little program, still in development, also would let people copy and paste data from a Web site to a computer or vice versa, basically by piggybacking on Windows' existing clipboard program. Ozzie showed how users could click on a little scissors icon to access a menu with "copy" and "paste" options allowing them to zap info back and forth.

Ozzie showed how his clipboard might lift structured data automatically, so someone could grab their billing address from the PC and drop it into a form at a Web shopping site.

Microsoft chief technology officer Ray Ozzie demonstrates a clipboard tool that would allow users to move snippets of data between their PCs and Web applications. (Leslie Walker - Post)

Down the road, Ozzie suggested, similar software could make it easy for people to swap all kinds of info between Web sites. He showed how one might create a "current location" sliver of data that you could store, say, on MSN Spaces, and have it automatically delivered to other sites such as Friendster. It could automatically display where you are by reading data from your cell phone.

Too bad he chose to demo a "current location" broadcasting alert, which seemed scary to me. Can you imagine, if criminals are having a field day now at teen social hangouts like MySpace.com, what they'd do if people starting blaring their whereabouts on the Web?

Still, the Web clipboard demo was nifty, though Ozzie noted Microsoft couldn't make it work unless Web users decided they really wanted it.

"The bottom line is this: I believe there is power in simplicity," he said.

"If we as a community decide to extend something like the clipboard to the Web, it could be really useful," he added.