The Harvard Business Review has a great feature on marketing to avatars that is worth a read. Its a strange concept - but closely linked to one of the fastest growing trends at the moment - identity personalisation. Marketing to who people really are is so passe, compared to spruiking to the idea of who they want to be. Kurt Vonnegart said it best in Mother Night - "We are what we pretend to be.."
Second Life, a long favourite of mine, is fast becoming the poster boy of what may end up being Web3.0. The Flickr generation is finally catching up, installing the bandwidth and processor hungry application on their computers and discovering the joys of a limitless virtual world, with a fully functioning internal economy and intellectual property management for whatever citizens create.
In recent weeks, people have even managed to make the borders between the broader web and Second Life more permeable - using HTTP calls to allow users to display Flickr photos directly in the simulator, or hijacking del.icio.us so that virtual locations can be bookmarked. It won't be long before many people choose to conduct many of their day to day interactions with web content in the richer, 3D environment that metaverse sims offer.
But the commercial opportunities behind Avatars are very real and not just reliant on high tech simulators. With a 90% adoption rate amoung teenagers Cyworld, South Korea's most popular social networking platform makes an absolute fortune from people customising their avatars and their homepages. Habbo Hotel works on a similar concept in the US, and is particularly popular with the audience too young to pretend to be old enough to use MySpace. Jump onto any instant messenger platform today - and you will also see a range of avatar customisation apps seeking to profit from people's desire to glitterise the way they represent their identity.
It all makes a kind of crazy sense. Sure, on the web you can be anybody. But who wants to be just anybody?
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