There is little online that I find more useless than virtual worlds.

I have three reasons to be so radical: 1) because the experience is virtual, little of it can be attributed to improving one’s current life; 2) they can be very entertaining but also waste a tremendous amount of people’s time; 3) they don’t make money, or at least not in a sustainable way.

I don’t despise virtual worlds, I simply find them entirely pointless, as I do for the level of attention brought to sites like Second Life.

More recently, thewatchavenue.com has been attracting my attention. I find the interface to be very sleek – the designers did a great job with it. I also find most of the content to be of good quality (articles, expert blogs, etc.). However, I also found the site’s virtual experience to lack in stickiness and, after ten minutes or so (not bad in web standards), I ultimately felt like I had no more time to spend on it.

The Internet was originally designed to allow people to share information more effectively, support education and spread knowledge. Companies like Google originally built their success precisely on that: save users time and try (as much as possible) to provide relevance.

The bottom line is that marketers, web developers and business people should focus first on supporting the experience offline: create effective local resources, provide online services that save clients and prospects time… the goal should be to improve real-life experience, not try to replace offline weaknesses with online gleam.