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When I posted the other day about going to the Supernova conference in San Francisco (I leave tomorrow), I forgot to mention that you’ll be able to virtually attend part of the conference by logging into Second Life this Thursday. And, probably not coincidentally, it looks like you’ll get a branded heads-up display when you attend, something that’s going to become more common as third parties become more closely integrated with the virtual world experience (see below).

As Jerry Paffendorf points out, the Electric Sheep Company (a sponsor of this blog) will put on one of its mixed-reality events, broadcasting Supernova’s Connected Innovator’s Showcase (held in association with TechCrunch) into SL on Thursday afternoon. (More details on the SL forums.) The showcase features a dozen forward-looking companies, most of which will be “launching or making significant announcements at the conference,” according to Supernova, so if you’re interested in what they have to say but can’t make it to the conference, this could be a good way to get the early news. It’s too bad the rest of the conference isn’t being shared this way, though. But I’ll be liveblogging most of the sessions I attend, so stay tuned.

One of the interesting things about this broadcast (if that’s the right word) is that it looks like attendees in Second Life will be given a branded heads-up display to facilitate the session.

I’m not sure what the HUD will do exactly, but this kind of thing is going to become more and more common as outside companies continue to use Second Life and other virtual worlds as marketing and media-distribution platforms — or for whatever other uses they come up with. Third-party portals will arise as well, where you sign up for SL or There.com on a non-SL Web page, with your first in-world destination being a region devoted to that company, and one of the first items you’re given being a HUD that helps you navigate the world and use that company’s content. This will push SL’s evolution into something more akin to a development platform, much like the World Wide Web. (Though the question, as ever, is whether Linden Lab will make its software open enough to let this happen.) If things continue this way, most of one’s early experience in and of SL will be through an entirely different brand. We won’t need to pay attention to the company behind the platform, just as we think of Google’s Web page as Google’s, not as a third-party site riding atop another company’s infrastructure. Of course, there is no company behind the Web. Further out, it’s possible that there will be no one company behind the metaverse. For the moment, it looks like things are progressing toward something in between.