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What happens when an advertising network decides to create a virtual world? You get riplounge. Stable Media, LLC has teamed up with Wyndstorm to create the upcoming virtual world for social networking, called riplounge. The beta version launches today. Now, we've seen a great deal of virtual worlds that have launched in the past couple of years, some of the more recent have had the blatant approach to self-promotion.
There's nothing wrong with that. I'd rather have an ad-supported virtual world, with digital banners and commercial-ridden video clips than a downloadable tool that requires my credit-card number. From there.com to Wells Fargo, virtual worlds are finding themselves as good use towards niche communities, with a variety of interactive options presented to the end user. I think the ways in which virtual worlds an be optimized are no where near realizing their full potential, but I very much enjoy watching the journey.
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riplounge may not be an obvious plug for advertising, but it will be another running experiment for finding the best way in which advertisers can leverage social networks that operate within the realms of a virtual world. As a social network, riplounge has better-than-most privacy controls, profiles, avatars, various locations for you to visit (yachts, night clubs), and certain social actions you can take with other users on the site. You know, like flirt and hold hands. All that stuff that avatars are supposed to do.