Nick over at Metaversed recently got an advance peak at Twinity, a new virtual world that looks to be a step up from Second Life.

“Let’s see…to purchase Italy, please enter your credit card number.”

Developer Metaversum has grand plans for the new VW, at least according to Nick’s article.

Twinity’s business model follows a fairly predictable formula: Premium accounts, currency commissions and item sales (property/objects). Where it gets interesting, is in their plans to farm out much of the user to user transactions to a third, as yet undisclosed party. The system will provide a double escrow utility for users to trade objects and property and services with real money. Primary markets, such as initial property sales will be made using a synthetic currency similar to the Linden Dollar or Entropian PED. Metaversum say they want to allow a more realistic cash flow, letting users trade with each other outside of the system as well as in it. The primary economy (synthetic currency) will come online during the initial beta, in 3 months or so, the secondary economy will follow that.

Everyone’s been wondering for a while when someone would take the plunge and try to create the “next-gen SL”. Could this be it?

I have an interesting thought on this one. You’re not allowed to build property/housing in-game, and it’s based on the layout of the real world. If they did make it possible to own property and build in-game (with a proportionate amount of financial risk involved to do so), would it predict growth areas in the real world to some extent? It couldn’t be anywhere close to exact, obviously, due the the different nature of things like crime and poverty in a virtual world, but…if you saw a new town starting to thrive at an in-game location where an analogue doesn’t exist in the real world, would it be time to think about investing in real-world real estate?

(And if you call buying a piece of land “real estate”, should purchasing a sim in SL be called “unreal estate”?)