Virtual Real Estate - Apples and Oranges

People are starting to draw inevitable comparisons between Second Life and Weblo, based on the fact that both of them involve user-created content and market-driven virtual property sales. I'm not convinced that the comparisons have any particular validity.

Weblo's a combination between blogshares, domain parking, Orkut and multi-level marketing. Real Estate ... Err ... Unreal Estate in Weblo looks like this. A country. A region. A public building or house. They're web-pages like that. You buy one for a US dollar, maybe attach a forum, photo gallery or some advertising to generate a little cash and generally try to promote the hell out of your location.

In a multi-level sense, you're above people within your geographical coverage. They sell their Unreal Estate to someone else, and you get a cut. Now, here's were it gets like the real world, and Second Life. What's your property worth? Well, whether it's dirt or data, it's worth whatever someone will pay for it. Ultimately all matters of property value are matters of perception. Unless your dirt has diamonds in it, it doesn't retain it's value if I haul it from one place to another. Neither does your data.


So, on that basis, Weblo and Second Life are somewhat comparable, but the resemblances more or less end there. Each Weblo property pretty much gets sold on a first-come-first-served basis, and it basically just a web-page. Try to build it up, build up it's traffic, and sell it to the next guy (or generate profit from advertising). It's a bit like being a venture capitalist, investing in companies you think you can build and flip.

What's interesting here is that basically the success of a Weblo site appears to be based on either how far up the tree you are (with a vibrant set of communities underneath), or how well you can build and maintain a community based solely around the notion of a physical place. For people who haven't already done that a few times, I wonder if they really appreciate how time-consuming and difficult that can really be.

If Weblo gets the right sort of people building out it's communities, that could all become big business, and could be come quite the interesting model if it gains traction -- although it seems to me that Weblo combines the worst qualities of several different ideas, but hey, it could be a Big Thing. Second Life, after all wasn't exactly the most sound-looking model out there.

But all this brings us back to our main point: The only real basis for comparison between Weblo and Second Life is that they're both on the Internet, and involve communities. Everything else they have in common, insofar as property goes, they have in common with the real world as well.