Twinity’s momentum continues

We’ve followed the development of mirror virtual world Twinity closely, and even questioned Twinity’s purpose. More than eighty thousand people have now registered to use Twinity – it’ll be interesting to see how much transparency there’ll be on active users into the future. Even on Second Life’s benchmark of roughly ten percent active versus registered, that’s a solid foundation.

Other highlights for Twinity in the last week or two:

– The listings guide used for the real-world German capital, zitty, is now in virtual Berlin, It includes a new event series, the zitty Readers Lounge, broadcast zitty’s 3D presence.

– A real-world German tourism / image campaign titled ‘be Berlin‘ has migrated to Twinity “to advertise the German capital to an international target group”.

– A strategic partnership has been signed with Bigpoint, a browser-based games company. Bigpoint will be using Twinity as a promotional platform for their own products.

– A virtual Christmas Market is launching at the Brandenburg Gate in virtual Berlin, starting at beginning of December.

It’s a fairly stark contrast to recent failure Google Lively – there’s significant European and Asian business interest in Twinity. Mirror worlds are are comfortable exploratory option for business and government and this seems to be driving the momentum to date. The big challenge is continuing to build an engaged base of users in an environment of open-source content creation options and some degree of cynicism toward overt brand promotion in virtual worlds.