All this hype about Second Life is resulting in lots more competitors, it seems. There was another rumor today about Google turning Google Earth into a sort of Second Life competitor. This one comes from Michael Eisenberg, a partner at Benchmark Capital, which is one of the investors in Second Life. He says the rumor is “Google is working on turning Google Earth into a virtual world a la SecondLife.”
Last month Business 2.0 speculated on this as well, noting that Google’s SketchUp product has tools to create 3-D models and add them as a layer to Google Earth.
The only missing pieces are avatars and a functioning economy. As EirePreneur pointed out, Google’s already eyeing the right advertising platforms for a virtual world, too.
APLINK - itsReal 
Makes a lot of sense. A virtual world that looks like the real world. 🙂
I’ve heard similar about IBM and Microsoft with their Virtual Earth. The latter makes sense because their 3D technology is far better than even Google’s. Plus they would likely integrate it with their other colloboration tools like Outlook and Instant Messaging so that, for example, you could accept a meeting request in Virtual Earth and have your Outlook calendar automatically updated and include a map of the virtual location.
It all is pretty exciting.