Gaia Online Draws Users Through Bebo
We reported earlier today that Gaia Online received a burst of funding from Time Warner after an investment from Sony just last month. Both Sony and Time Warner's Warner Bros. have also signed deals to distribute their film catalogs to Gaia's 3 million monthly users. Apparently a large part of those users are coming from social networking site Bebo, which claims 40 million users. Gaia launched its Gaia OMG app on Bebo last month. The social networking app, which allows basic functionality in the virtual world has gone from Gaia's 430th largest traffic referrer to in the virtual world's top 10.
The viral nature of social networks--and their larger mainstream success--looks more and more appealing for virtual worlds, but most haven't seen this degree of success or integration.
The Gaia app launched as a part of Bebo's larger third-party developer push, which also saw a cross-platform games and avatars push from Bunchball. Facebook has seen its share of virtual worlds projects as well, with the most obvious being the embedded Active Worlds client. Linden Lab hasn't made any push of its own, but third-party developers have recently added even more functionality to a Second Life Facebook app.
For all that, though, neither virtual worlds' users seem to look at the social network as tightly integrated with their 3D experience. It seems like Scenecaster, which doesn't feature a nearly as immersive experience, comes much closer to capitalizing on Facebook's success, briefly topping the networks most active apps in early December.
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