This morning Cory Ondrejk, Linden Lab's CTO, spoke at a Churchill Club breakfast event about Second Life' success amongst both users and businesses. So, with a GDP of $60 million per month and over 22,000 subscribers making money in this virtual world, is this really for real or just another fad?
Well if you were not a believer so far, like I was before I attended the event, you better get on the bandwagon quick. NBC, Toyota, or Adidas are all building a presence in the Second Life world. So is IBM, investing $10 million to develop a technology lab within Second Life. After the talk, I caught up with Ondrejk to understand why is there so much fuss around Second Life.

Virtual worlds will work well when you wish other people were there. Like a jazz concert of an unknown musician in Nigeria that you would attend with thousands of other people from dozen different countries. That's cool and something that you can not do in the real world

Ondrejk also mentioned the success of virtual classrooms that are better attended by students than the real-life ones. "Students feel more confortable and less shy to ask questions", he says. For the Second Life's CTO, virtual worlds are just another communication tool like the email or the Web. In some cases, it makes sense to communicate through a virtual world, in a large group situation for example, some other times email or IM are just as good.

We're not here to try to eliminate real world or face to face communication. But sometimes virtual worlds are a better a way to connect people

And on Second Life hardware architecture, here what Ondrejk had to say,

The only performance metric that counts is MIPS per watt or CPU performance per power. Intel is way ahead on the power game since October. We are completely agnostic, we don't care. Who ever is ahead, we buy their computers.