Your Second Life, no really

In the early days of the web, businesses swarmed to adopt private chatrooms and instant messenger programs as effective business tools for dealing with out-of-office communication. That's so 2-D. As 3-D environments like Second Life become more viable, is it possible that one day we may all conduct business in immersive online environments, in a sort of, well, second life? It's a definite possibility. Last year Lawrence Lessig, cyber-law professor and founder of the Creative Commons, began conducting seminars on legal, social and technological issues while on "location" in the Second Life virtual world. This month, Forrester Research released a 24-page report, Getting Real Work Done In Virtual Worlds, telling its clients that virtual worlds are on the brink of becoming valuable work tools; and that within 5 years, the 3-D Internet will be as important for business as the web is today. As Gary Trudeau said, "I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence." Maybe someday soon, in the non-local Internet of the near-futre, I may actually succeed.