I am listening to the end of the keynote address at Virtual Worlds 2008 in Hollywood and the future, according to IBM, is in collaboration.

It seems as if metrics are already a given for Virtual Worlds, even thoughnot that much has been done beyond a few companies, including Code4software.com.

I am seeing some former team members at IBM here on this trip. My overall takeaway is this topic, virtual worlds, is still a niche, insider, type show with well established players such as IBM, Electric Sheep, and a few others, but no real killer app, nothing yet that would take the 3D Gaming Space past the niche that it presently is.

Incidently, Google would have had a reason to be here, after all, they released Google Lively just 2 months ago. Google is not here in any capacity beyound the Google TShirt I am wearing today. Ha, ha …. But it is true.

As much as I decry Google for dominating the search market too much, for actually being the main force driving much of the digital economy, it is just so obvious, that what is missing from Virtual Worlds, is the colloboration (choking on IBM’s words) with big Search Engine Portals and online retail companies.

Interesting. I often get insights like this as I write.