Second Life: Deja Vu from Club Caribe

I was just reading in AuctionBytes that eBay has allowed the sale of items from the virtual world "Second Life," which is an exception to their general policy of banning the sale of "virtual game items."

It's been noted by Ina Steiner of AuctionBytes, and others, that eBay's founder Pierre Omidyar has invested in Second Life. There is a great article about the site in today's (Mon. Feb. 5) USA Today, and a profile of its founder.

The whole thing about Second Life, avatars and virtual worlds makes me smile, because it reminds me of the virtual world "Club Caribe," which was produced by AOL's predecessor company, Quantum Computer Services, Inc., where I worked from 1988-1997.

I only spent a little time in Caribe -- it had been called "Habitat" prior to that, and was co-produced by Lucasfilm -- but it was memorable. As I recall I was running it on a Commodore 64 computer, and at the time I had two keys which stuck, the "w" and the "y," so my scintillating virtual comments were things like "Hi, ho are ou?" instead of "Hi, How are you?"

One of the more legnedary creatures in Caribe was a purple worm-like thing that people would get turned into from time to time. You could also steal someone else's head, which caused much joy and merriment, in addition to feelings of revenge, no doubt.

A cool site that has images of Caribe is here:

http://www.dsgames.net/qlink/caribe/pictures1.htm

It will be interesting to see what happens with Second Life, and if it morphs into a whole new, people-friendly way to navigate the net, similar to the way Mosaic, later Netscape, revolutionized the way we browse the Internet.

I also wouldn't be surprised if eBay, Google or Yahoo bought Second Life. For some reason I see Google as being the company most interested, because they seem to be into revolutionary concepts, but eBay already has the Pierre Omidyar connection, so who knows.

As with everything in the Internet world, stay tuned. But can we please take a moment to remember Habitat and Club Caribe, two of the pioneer virtual communities?