RIPlounge moves into Beta

Earlier this week I got word that there's yet another Virtual World to be launched into beta. This time it's Riplounge. Now, I've been getting used to typical web 2.0 names like flickr, tumblr, xing and ning and so on, and virtual worlds do have their own peculiarities when it comes to finding an available url.... but RipLounge ?

You may think "Quod Nomen Est," but Riplounge. It immediately has several associations, like R.I.P. and Rip off, but that will probably not be the intend of the producers, Wyndstorm Corporation. If you look at the the typography in RipLounge and note the capitalised RL.

With this new platform Wyndstorm is trying to add more social web 2.0 functionality to the realm of NVE's, and thus make the crossover from the Metaverse to RL (real life), perhaps that explains the naming and typography. This is a sound business plan in itself. 3D Social Networking will be the mashup for the next few years. The question is, will it work out in riplounge?

RipLounge opened up for beta signup this week (and so I registered) and is to open early april. The only thing we've got to go by is the promo video out on the web:

Riplounge.com Demo - video powered by Metacafe

It's a little early to tell which way it's gonna go, but judging from the promo I'd say Virtual World is a big word. It looks more like your avatar will be confined in a limited number of rooms, much like Stagespace for instance.

The world is set up around music and clubs, and is aimed at the more grown-up audience in the range of 25 to 35 year olds. Year end 2007 we saw an enormous increase and focus for (girl) teen worlds, and RipLounge is setting itself a difficult challenge as this agegroup is much more critical and not easily satisfied with a few gimmicks. In this agegroup the world has to attain some level of persistance. RipLounge promises to showcase independent music artists and offers advertisers “in-scene” advertising in order to attempt this persistance.

From a graphics point of view RipLounge doesn't seem to offer new and improved stuff either, probably best described by Tech Crunch:

"Having not yet tested the service it would be perhaps unfair to make an assessment based on the demo video, however why avatars waddle around like penguins in each scene was not made clear. Maybe it’s a special feature…or maybe not."

However, within the limited are (judging from what we have now) and the quality of the graphics, RipLounge will have a mountain to climb to grab a bit of the market.