Research shows that users identify with their avatars, and are more willing to take risks. People who wouldn't speak up in face-to-face meetings or on a conference call will speak up in Second Life, Kingdon said.

Renaud agreed, noting that meetings in virtual worlds are more active, especially when they involve five or more participants. You have the possibility for serendipitous encounters and side-conversations that you have in real-life meetings, but you don't get on a conference call or Web conference. Moreover, meetings occur over voice and text chat simultaneously, which allows "horizontal crosstalk" to go on in text chat and IM while the main meeting is happening in voice, he said. "You get a Mystery Science Theater sideways discussion."

Saiman said, "What's different between Second Life and a phone call or a chat room is you can see someone, you can recognize them, and your attitude is tuned and adjusted by the accouterments nearby. If you go to a peaceful sim, you may not realize it, but those birds twittering and the palm trees swaying, they have an influence on your thought processes. Aggressive places make you anxious. The best places are those that exploit those things and bring a story to your mind, bring you to a frame of existence you could never achieve with a chat room or a telephone call."

Other virtual worlds might be able to exploit the same factors -- but Second Life has a big first-mover advantage, with a substantial user base and a wealth of virtual objects already created, Saiman said.

Selling Real-Life Insurance

Aviva USA is looking to mix Second Life and real-life marketing for success. The life insurance company launched a campaign, built with the help of IBM, to recruit agents using Second Life. The average age of an insurance agent is 55 years old; Aviva hopes to use Second Life to attract younger, more technologically sophisticated agents. And the company hopes its presence in Second Life will convince potential customers that it's a forward-thinking company,and improve Aviva USA's brand awareness.

The Aviva USA Island has its own orientation area, for people to learn how to use Second Life. It has meeting rooms and an area where people can watch orientation videos.

The company is promoting its Second Life presence at industry conferences, in industry trade publications, in ads and press releases. The company identifies prospects in the real world, and then offers them the option of coming to Second Life for further discussion. Mark Heitz, president of sales and distribution for Aviva USA, said the company is pleased with results so far, but it's still early days. "I don't think we can say we produced X amount of business. We have been attracting people. We're seeing initial interest from people who were not doing business with us and are now interested in doing business with us," he said. "But it's too early to say if it's a success. We knew it would be at least a year before the kickoff before we have success with it."

Smoothing Out Difficulties

Linden Lab is hard at work smoothing the difficulties Second Life users face.

This year, Linden Lab launched new viewer client software with lower crash rates, and improved stability in its server software. As part of the effort to improve platform stability, Linden Lab hired former AOL executive Frank Ambrose to oversee network network and technical operations, reporting directly to Kingdon, after nine years at AOL as senior VP of technology for infrastructure and network services.

Recently, the company began converting the Second Life scripting engine to the open source Mono, for improved performance and stability, and to give developers added flexibility in choosing programming languages with which to develop for Second Life. Until now, Second Life has relied on its own, proprietary Linden Scripting Language (LSL), which restricts growth because nobody outside Second Life knows or uses LSL.