KEY POINTS:
Forget expanding Dubai, forget sprawling Las Vegas, forget the mushrooming skyscrapers of Shanghai. There's a city state which, at just five years old, has enjoyed such turbocharged growth that its square mileage already dwarfs New York. Not bad for a place that doesn't exist.
Second Life is a
virtual world that lives only on the worldwide web.
Sitting at their real-life PCs, its users pilot a digital character, or avatar, around a 3D simulation of the real world. It even has its own economy in which people design virtual items such as clothes, jewellery or furniture, or buy and develop land, then sell to other users in Linden dollars, which can be converted to real money. There are around 55,000 people making money from Second Life, a few of them millionaires, but there are con artists and fraudsters too.
This Matrix-like world was the childhood dream of Philip Rosedale, the 39-year-old founder of Linden Lab, the San Francisco-based company which runs it all. His not inconsiderable ambitions include redefining the entire web and helping to save the planet by reducing the need for business air travel.
When he's asked how big Second Life is now, Rosedale doesn't miss a beat:
"Four hundred and sixty-two square miles [1196.5sq km]. The land mass, which is growing at 5 per cent a month, is so big now that if you had a helicopter and flew around the edge of the island, so to speak, it would be expanding too fast to really figure out what was going on."
As websites go, this requires a gigantic electronic brain: thousands of servers crunching 100,000 terabytes of user-generated content.
But Second Life's spectacular growth has tailed off over the past year. Critics have been quick to challenge its user figures, noting that while more than 12 million Second Life accounts have been created, the vast majority are no longer active.
Rosedale doesn't pretend otherwise: "It's true most of the people who sign up don't come back, but the people who stay are still growing steadily, which is driving the usage up."
In the meantime, Second Life's version of the US presidential campaign may be entertaining enough.
During a recent rally of Barack Obama supporters, virtual gunmen appeared and opened fire. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Obama backers escaped by teleporting to the CNN hub, a public space, to continue their rally.
But it was only a brief respite - before long, a picture of Obama next to one of Osama bin Laden was flying all over the screen.
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