http://secondlife.com/

A 3D digital world imagined, created and owned by its Residents. You can chat, play games, build houses, and go to parties, all with thousands of other people from around the world.

taken from the FAQ http://secondlife.com/faq.php

I'm mostly concerned with this http://secondlife.com/developers.php

It seems like a mmorpgish game, where you can build a home, model, pet, car or whatever using their modeling system (or possibly import from others), and can then script it to do what you want. After reading their site up and down, I've decided it's very very interesting a concept indeed. I was curious if anyone else here had heard of it or had a chance to try that free 7 day trial they offer. I can't run it on this laptop right now, and it'll be a while until I get a chance to use a system it'll run on.

Well i was going to try the 7 day free trial but you cant sign up for that without entering credit card details :-\

same here. sounds kinda cool but a waste of time.

I thought the idea of designing concepts to see how people react to them was very cool, and would just about be all I used it for if I were to sign up.

I've played it and....I simple have to state that I've never been more scarred by any game in my life. Beware other's imaginations. I kid you not. This game is for adults only. There are some very nice people there, but if you want to even own a home or largely keep anything you built you need to buy land and pay the rent. Also, people can in some places kill you and lag isn't that great so any sort of projectiles and such are pretty lame.

Some areas are nice to visit though. I visited a skyscraper, a park, and an art museum and thoroughly enjoyed myself at those places. I also met a developer in-game who gave me a free car for my inventory so I could drive it around.

I have Second Life. It's good if you have a lot of spare time.

The thing that's really impressive about Second Life is that most everything outside of the tutorial is player created. This does mean that much of it is really quite crap, but still.
Creating stuff is fun, I made a little man that dances.

Blokey above is totally right about it being quite adult. It seems to be really popular with.. uh.. furries.

In terms of player created-ness, Second Life is above and beyond everything else, but it'd be a whole lot better if there were more people around, and if the people were more interesting. If you're looking for an 'online world' type thing, like a 3D IRC, then There is superior. It's speficially geared towards chatting, and does it very well. It has a player creation functionality too, but it's a bit crap so not many people do it. The somewhat dodgy thing about There is that you have to pay real money to get the virtual currency with which to buy stuff (alongside a monthly fee, I think), which I'm not too keen on.

Second Life also has the best customisation thing ever. It's probably too good, I spent hours on it. World of Warcraft's was totally bland in comparison. in fact, it was totally bland full stop.

I think it was a few months ago when I first heard of about Second Life. I came across an article written by one of the creaters on how they set up their server. You might notice that the client application isn't really that large; this is due to the fact that they send you a lot of the content in real time. This allows customization that other MMOG's typically do not have, but it also requires the user to have a better-than 56k connection.

If you're curious about the article, feel free to check it out: http://www.gamasutra.com/resource_guide/20030916/rosedale_01.shtml

You'll have to register at the site, but it's free and has a lot of other articles as well.

OMG TEH METAVERSE!

Except not as good, probably.

Been in there a while, it's great stuff. There's furries, sure, but it's not that large of a population. Not large enough to put me off anyway.

Yeah, credit card is required because it's actually required that you be 18 or older (there are sections put off where adult content either is or is not allowed).

I've heard a lot of success stories of people who make money off playing it, some of which have quit their jobs, thanks to sites like gamingopenmarket.com and ige.com. All money trading is third party so that separates it from There.com and Entropia.

What keeps me in though is the 10 buck lifetime deal. Really makes it feel more like a metaverse or second internet, less like a "I have to use it because I'm paying monthly" kind of MMOG.