3pointD.com

Besides showing up on the cover of Business Week, Second Life has recently begun attracting the kind of people that could not only draw many more residents to the virtual world, but who could also draw major technology companies and other developers in, which could lead to a paradigm shift in what’s happening on the SL Grid.

“It’s crack for my brain,” says former MTV VJ Adam Curry, on a recent podcast. Curry — who has bought a castle in SL and wants to retire there — seems to have gotten the place immediately, describing at as “a platform.” Microsoft’s Robert Scoble, who’s also been poking around SL lately, goes further, describing the place as an operating system. Leo Laporte of This Week in Tech, the most popular podcast on the Web, has also been avatarized lately (under the great name Pruneface Spatula), and is equally excited. What’s important here is that these guys, for the most part, see the world not as a fantasy realm that’s just good for getting your freak on (despite Laporte’s fascination with nude skins), but as a place where powerful development is possible.

If that becomes the new way to perceive Second Life, the world could start drawing in people and companies who want to build broad and powerful apps that not only work for the people in SL but which create hooks between SL, the Web, the real world and other virtual worlds, and which could help SL evolve from something that’s still very like a game, to something that’s more like a 3D version of the World Wide Web.

SL already has its home-grown developers, of course, but few really robust applications have come out of the world. (SL resident Cristiano Midnight’s SnapZilla comes to mind as one. Full disclosure: Cris, like me, is a regular member of the SecondCast cast.) In part, this is because the platform itself doesn’t provide many useful windows. Getting data in and out of the world is a kludgy endeavor at the moment. But an upcoming patch of SL will support outgoing HTTP calls, which should make things much easier. And the in-world scripting language, currently bespoke, will eventually move to Mono, the company has said. With all that in place, and with hungry dot-commers and bigger players now eyeing the space, it’s only a matter of time (not much time, I’d wager) before we start to see more interesting things emerging. And you know where we go from there: straight to the 3pointD world.