PR and communication types continue to wrangle about the value of Second Life (SL). My own position is pretty simple. I’m not a gamer and I’m having no fun learning my way around this virtual environment. But businesses and other institutions (ranging from universities to political candidates to government agencies) are taking their brands and images to Second Life, and we’d better be there providing communication counsel. If we don’t, our employers and clients will find somebody else who can. (Current reports from SL indicate residents are utterly ignoring traditional brands that try to get their attention in-world, suggesting an opportunity for new-thinking marketers who can crack the SL code.)

That doesn’t mean that I necessarily believe that Second Life will emerge as the virtual space in which everyone interacts. (Anybody who has ever read Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” knows exactly what I’m talking about.) It may. Something better may come along. Or SL could wind up joining forces with other similar virtual worlds. Who knows?

What I do know is that SL isn’t the only game in town. A few weeks back I was invited to take a tour of There.com, a world not unlike SL but with less of an edge. A quick Google search indicated that There.com is widely known in certain circles, but I’d never heard of it. According to my tour guide, Product Management Director Betsy Book (whose in-world avatar name is bsquared), the general tone of There.com is PG-13. That’s me—Lowe Downe—in bsquared’s house where I conducted the interview.)

Like SL, There.com is not a game, but rather a social virtual world where people interact with each other. But things are a lot simpler at There.com—intentionally, Book told me. SL, she said, “is for people who are experienced with online environments, people who are very savvy with digital environments. Ours is more mainstream and easier to set up.”

For example, constructing buildings and other objects in SL requires residents to learn a scripting language. There.com offers building tools that let you piece things together to create buildings and a tool called Style Maker to create clothing. It’s also easier to change the appearance of your avatar, although you do have complete control to make your avatar look any way you like, something that happens when you go to the “spa.”

There.com also has its own economy based on There Bucks, not unlike SL’s Linden dollars, You can’t buy land, though. Instead, you can buy a “Port-A-Zone” in which you can construct a home. But the zone goes into your inventory so you can move it when you like. You would pay rent to have your home on a lot in a neighborhood, with the rent check going to the neighborhood’s owner. Enterprising residents buy neighborhoods so they can rent out the lots. But the There Bucks they makes go into an in-world escrow account for in-world uses. “There is no reverse exchange,” Book says, another way There.com differs from SL.

It surprised me to learn that There.com has nearly half a million members, which puts it in the same class as SL. (Book would not disclose how many of those members are online at any given time.) Basic membership gives you your customizable avatar, text chat, instant messaging, access to the store and auctions, the ability to listen to streaming radio in-world and access to 20 social clubs. Premium membership—a one-time $9.99 fee—adds voice chat enabled by VOIP (Voice Over IP), something many SL residents can only dream about. Premium members can also earn There Bucks and join up to 50 clubs.

A significant portion of the There.com membership is made up of people in their late teens through early 20s, which caught the virtual world’s owners by surprise. “We’re not marketing to them,” Book said, “but they’re coming in in droves.” They may be attracted by some of the organized activities, which range from car racing to paintball competitions. Some of the activities are broadly popular, like the recently-concluded fashion challenge, a kind of reality show in which a contestant was voted out each week based on member votes. There’s video on the challenge site, and speaking of video, an upcoming competition will focus on machinema, the art of filmmaking using gaming environments.

Like SL, there are also dances and discos, but for the more adult activities, people still need to go the SL route. “We’re definitely more wholesome,” Book said.

There have been business prescences at There.com—Levis, for example, had a line of jeans a few years ago, which now command high There Buck prices. More business activities are inevitable, Book said, in addition to the businesses being created specifically for in-world use by enterprising members.

There.com has been around for about three years, also about as long as SL, and is currently owned by Makena Technologies, which acquired the rights in 2005.

All of which is interesting in its own right, but even moreso considering the population of There.com—which I hadn’t heard of until I was invited on the tour—is roughly as large as SL’s and members are just as vested in the communities (read some There.com resident blogs to get a sense of what I’m talking about). Virtual worlds are going to be big—not as games or escapism, but as a way for people to engage with other people and brands they can’t engage with in Real Life. It’s just another argument for communicators to take it seriously and figure out how communication works in these worlds.