Flirting is the rocket-fuel which drives much of the interest in online social networking sites. Today one of Sweden’s largest flirt-driven social networking sites, Playahead, is going to offer its members access to the rapidly growing online virtual world of Second Life, turning its members into avatars that can hold hands, kiss, and blow raspberries at each other in virtual space. Strange, I know, but it all makes perfect sense…

Playahead is something of a phenomenon in Sweden. You can check out the recently opened UK version to get a feel for it, and it’s also got sites in Denmark, Germany, and Holland. It’s full of pictures of desperately sultry teenagers, and plunges you instantly into a breathy world of online chit-chat, check-outs, and no doubt pretty harmless fantasy.

It’s true the language of the UK site feels as though it has been translated electronically. There’s something just wrong about the eurotrash prose: "Waaaah, good to have you! Welcome to the wonderful world of Playahead, a world filled of boys and girls who just loooove to chat and flirt." Boys and girls? Hmm, don't worry, it’s not targeting five-year olds, judging by the surly teenager in the baseball cap on the home page. "Playahead has around two million members who are proportionately divided between girls and boys," the site reports. More interestingly, the site claims that in the evenings over 40,000 members are online concurrently, the size, as it points out, of a small town.

As a curmudgeonly forty-something I’m not really the target demographic here, so I shouldn’t be too rude about Playahead’s wacky prose. Its ‘proportionately divided’ members seem to love it: they meet up in person at community get-togethers, and the site has its old guard, its newbies, its heroes and villains. Yet like any community, and any small town, how do its founders plan to keep it interesting and fresh? How will it keep growing? Where’s it going?

One answer for Playahead has been to move into the third dimension. As of today, the company is bringing its members into the online virtual world of Second Life, with their own dedicated island, their own wardrobes, and integration between their current Playahead online profile and their Second Life account. This means that members who know each other through online chat, through reading each other’s blog entries, and looking at each other’s pictures can now take on virtual embodiment as 3D avatars, animated images of themselves, and hang out in the virtual bars and clubs of Playahead’s new island.

According to Justin Bovington of Rivers Run Red, who runs the London-based virtual worlds creative house which is bringing Playahead into Second Life, initial demand is intense. Rivers Run Red got 10,000 registrations from Playahead members in only three minutes.

A flood of new members into any community creates certain stresses. Second Life has a steep learning curve, and Rivers Run Red doesn’t want to overwhelm the island’s servers, or the rest of Second Life, with confused Swedish newbies wandering around with boxes on their heads (a common problem among new Second Lifers unfamiliar with the software’s pernickety interface.)

What interests me about all this is the way in which an existing two-dimensional online community has been brought into three dimensions. It’s as though the flat profiles of the community’s members had risen up off the page like a pop-up book and suddenly starting walking around with independent life. It also solves a number of problems. Any online community has to keep offering its members a richer user experience to attract newcomers and to keep its jaded, most experienced members interested. Being suddenly able to take your online persona for a virtual drink certainly constitutes a novelty that may keep Playahead exciting for its more experienced members. At the same time, it opens up the experience of being in a 3D virtual world like Second Life to lots more people. Playahead’s members presumably already know how much fun hanging around in an online community can be: to enjoy Second Life all they need to do is get their heads around the virtual embodiment that comes with having an avatar you can shape, dress and enjoy in lots of exciting ways.

If you’re interested in the evolution of the metaverse, that grand word that attempts to describe the growing incarnation of our lives and desires into imaginary three-dimensional worlds, it’s fascinating to imagine what would happen if other larger social networking sites made the leap into the third dimension. Imagine if everyone on AOL could suddenly interact via 3D. Or if MySpace home pages suddenly popped into the third dimension, enabling you to see not just the music, words, and images of fellow MySpace users, but to meet their avatars, walk around their virtual homes, sit on their virtual sofas and study their virtual dance moves?

Current online social spaces like Playahead and MySpace are building a two-dimensional path that leads directly to the heart of the metaverse, and once people have started to invest a lot of time and energy into their social networking accounts they’re going to be a lot more open to the next step: taking that first, awkward walk as a newly born avatar, stumbling around in three-dimensional space, and trying to find someone cute to have a virtual drink with.

If social networking sites do start leaking into each other’s worlds, we can look forward to lots of amusing misunderstandings and much amiable confusion. Here’s a tip for jaded members of Second Life. If you’re still looking for someone cute to have a drink with, learn a little Swedish.

Click here to read more articles by Michael Parsons

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