Build Your Personal 'Second Life'

Ever dream of creating your own virtual world, a la Second Life or World of Warcraft? Soon you’ll be able to, thanks to Metaplace, a company that lets users host virtual worlds online, building them the same way they’d create other Internet content, reports Technology Review. Using a Flash client, creators can embed their worlds anywhere from a social networking profile to a blog.

  "We think virtual worlds are just a new medium," says the company’s president. "Like pictures, audio, and video--virtual worlds are eventually going to start being ubiquitous on all sorts of Web pages." It will be possible to build a basic world within five minutes, he said. Metaplace’s system has been released to a small group of beta testers and will be more widely released in April. (More virtual worlds stories.)