Neoco

Stable Media, LLC has teamed up with Wyndstorm to create riplounge – the upcoming virtual world for social networking. The beta version of which launched earlier this week.

The past few years has seen the launch of loads of virtual worlds. Some of the more recent have had a blatant approach to self-promotion, but most people would rather have an ad-supported virtual world, with digital banners and commercial-ridden video clips, than a downloadable tool that requires their credit-card number. Riplounge may not be the most obvious plug for advertising, but it will be another running experiment for finding the best way in which advertisers can leverage social networks that operate within the realms of a virtual world. And these types of experiments can only benefit the industry.

As a social network, riplounge has better-than-most privacy controls, profiles, avatars, various locations for you to visit such as yachts and night clubs, and certain social actions that you can take with other users on the site, such as flirting and hold hands -  all the things that avatars are supposed to do.

The various virtual locations will be used as multimedia channels for content distribution and advertising purposes. For instance, the night club could have a virtual DJ release a new song. It’s the interactive and custom options that spin off from such promotions that will provide value to the users on the other end of riplounge – so it will be really interesting to see what Sable Media plans to do towards this end.

Tags  ad network advertising avatar experiment multimedia riplounge social network stable media user virtual world wyndstorm