As PaidContent points out, Coca-Cola has been down many a virtual marketing road — including the launch of its own world, known as Coke Studios, about five years ago. Although it claims to have attracted millions of members, it can’t be doing that well, since the company is effectively transporting (or teleporting) the entire shebang into There.com. Customers will apparently be able to use virtual Coke coupons to buy merchandise for their avatars and that sort of thing.

From the look of the screenshots on Mashable, you can wander around the island — shaped like a giant Coke bottle — and sit on giant Coke-logo benches and so on. I just have one question: who in their right mind thinks anyone is actually going to want to do this? Is there some kind of Kool Aid that gets passed around at the meetings where they come up with this kind of idiocy?

It reminds me of the scene in the movie Big — the one where Tom Hanks makes a wish as a young boy and is turned into an adult for a few months, and finds work at a toy company. A rival at the company is trying to compete with Tom’s brilliant Transformer-style toys, and says he has one that’s better because it turns into a giant skyscraper, at which point Tom says: “It turns into a building? What’s fun about that?”

Wandering around a giant Coke-shaped island with Coke logo benches and trading in virtual Coke coupons? What’s fun about that?

That last one might be a bit of a stretch, considering that — as the NYT piece notes — a number of the companies that set up shops in Second Life (such as Adidas) or built their own private islands (such as Wells Fargo) have pulled up stakes and departed for greener pastures. Maybe when the guy who sells superfast rollerblades in Second Life becomes a global enterprise, the ICANN CEO’s prediction will have some merit.

Until then, Second Life seems more interesting to me as a social experiment than a business proposition. The fascinating thing is that even in a world where they can be and do anything they want (which can also cause problems, as Erin notes), people choose avatars that look like supermodels and spend hundreds of dollars on shoes. In an interesting economic twist, people won’t buy things that appear expensive in Linden dollars, even though in “real” money they are extremely cheap.

Habbo Hotel, as Wagner notes, doesn’t get a lot of publicity — perhaps because there are no blue-haired vixens with gravity-defying breasts in Habbo, and no flying pink penises either — but it definitely deserves some, and perhaps more than Second Life. Although it offers only blocky, 1985-style graphics, it has become a hit with young users and generates revenues of about $77-million (likely orders of magnitude more than Second Life).

Wagner says that a recent talk by one of the principals at Sulake — the Finnish company that created the site — made several points about virtual worlds, including the necessity for multiple revenue streams and the high turnover rates that such “games” have (something Second Life has also demonstrated). Gamasutra has more on the address here.

To me, one of the most interesting things about Habbo is that it is what the Sulake founder calls “a gameless game,” in which virtually anything can become a game. When my 12-year-old daughter used to play it a lot, she played something called “falling furni,” in which tiny avatars tried to catch pieces of virtual furniture as they fell from the sky.

Sounds dumb, doesn’t it? But she loved it. Second Life is also a gameless game in many ways — and that is a big part of its appeal. Whether it can ever become a real business still remains to be seen.

Is it fair for Pete Cashmore at Mashable to say that Sony’s virtual world — which no one has even really used yet — “crushes” Second Life with a “superior platform?” I’m not so sure. I have a lot of respect for Pete, but I don’t see what’s so superior about Sony’s platform exactly. Yes, it sounds like users can share music using PlayStation Home, and perhaps even video as well, and those are things that would make Second Life pretty useful as well. But Sony’s effort still sounds kind of sterile to me. It sort of looks like a really nicely designed shopping mall where you can only buy things from one company.

Others have noticed the same thing — that Sony appears to want to control everything, as usual. Ian Betteridge picked out the same paragraph in Gizmodo’s description to focus on that caught my eye, where it says:

“It doesn’t seem to have an economy in it like Second Life, as far as we saw, so all your money will be sent to Sony when you purchase arcade games, furniture, and more clothing for your avatar.”

That sounds great, doesn’t it? And a blogger who writes at Rebang goes into more detail about the lack of user input that PlayStation Home allows. He says of Sony:

“If they imagine the future of online worlds is lording over a closed-wall kingdom where commoners seek audience and approval from their overlord, they’re badly out of touch in my opinion.”

Unfortunately, the fact that Sony might be out of touch — or might create something that attempts to lock users into a “roach motel” model (albeit a very nice-looking one) shouldn’t really come as any big surprise. As for the likelihood of success, Tony Hung has a great phrase in his post at Deep Jive Interests, calling it “charming, desperate and futile.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Further reading:

Anastasia Goodstein at YPulse doesn’t see Sony’s new online venture as a Second Life killer either, but the company gets some props from Jeff Nolan at Venture Chronicles.

Meanwhile, Clay Shirky teamed up with Valleywag to pore over Second Life stats and conclude that the whole thing is overhyped, and there was a recent announcement that Second Life was going to open-source the software interface to the game. And virtual millionairess Anshe Chung claimed copyright infringement after being attacked by giant flying penises.

Is Second Life a joke? Yes, in a way. Not only is it weird to be flying around in a blocky universe (let alone the penises), but it’s a little goofy that people try to promote the business aspects of the virtual world while sporting avatar names like ePredator Potato — the name of IBM’s Second Life evangelist. And yet, there is clearly something there. No doubt many people thought the idea of uploading videos was a joke too, or using the Internet as a phone.

Ethan Kaplan is right, there are still issues with Second Life (Webomatic has had some too), including lag and other problems. And Valleywag’s informant is correct that the financial side is closer to a pyramid scheme than a real business. But those issues will be fixed — if not by Second Life, then by someone else.

I came across a post that made some good points on (where else) Second Life Insider. Everyone likes to talk about how Second Life is dumb because, well… it’s virtual, instead of real. So if you talk to someone on the phone, is that real? Of course it is. How about if you message them using MSN? So why isn’t chatting with them while flying around in a video game just as real?

Update:

There have been several reports — which Mike Arrington of TechCrunch summarizes here — that Google might be looking at turning Google Earth into some kind of virtual world a la Second Life.