After recently speaking with the folks at Vivox about their voice solutions for online communities, I finally took the time to experience Second Life – the much-hyped 3D virtual world with over 2 million inhabitants. The topic of Second Life came up because Vivox is providing free phone calls to all Second Life residents (more on that later).

First, Second Life is an amazing experiment that deserves much more attention than I have time to give here. I urge you to visit it for yourself. In a nutshell, it is an MMORPG where online denizens can adopt a customizable lifelike avatar, and interact with others much as they might (or might hope to) in the real world. More than that though, in Second Life you can create art, buy land, build buildings, sell services, and even be taxed by the IRS. As the Second Life website tells it:

There are as many opportunities for innovation and profit in Second Life as in the Real World. Open a nightclub, sell jewelry, become a land speculator; the choice is yours to make. Thousands of residents are making part or all of their real life income from their Second Life Businesses.

Enter Vivox. Funded by VoIP guru Jeff Pulver and two VCs, Vivox has the unique (to my knowledge) and thoroughly Voice 2.0 mission of bringing rich interaction (voice, video and chat) to online communities such as Second Life. Vivox has built a platform that:

enables online service providers to weave IP communication features into their communities [and] empowers those communities and their members to set their own rules and pace – allowing the technology to enhance their lives, not inhibit them. Taking into account that every person has a different lifestyle and communication preference … graduated connections are established based on the rules of the community and preferences of individual members.

The company announced in September that it would be providing its platform services to Second Life residents through a partnership with Illusion Factory. The twist here is that Second Life players will not only interact amongst themselves, but will also be able to make calls to the PSTN from inside the virtual world.

To promote the service, the companies are giving away a million minutes worth of free calls.

The minutes, which will be available to players at Vivox phone booths scattered around the Second Life world, will enable users to call each other and people on real (i.e., cell and land-line) phones. There will also be some Vivox “microphones” embedded in Second Life that, when picked up, can be used for five-way conference calls among gamers.

From a strictly technical standpoint, there is really no difference between the Vivox/Second Life calling service and the any other PC-to-Phone call. And with many offers of free calling available from the likes of Skype, the million free minutes are not especially remarkable.

But that is not the interesting part. While I am hardly the target audience for a role-playing world, I must admit that there is a decidedly different feeling about making a call from your virtual identity to a PSTN number in the real world. What would the caller ID look like? Will virtual worlds have their own area codes? Or country codes? Something tells me that my own Second Life alter-ego, Ebi Nakatani, would speak with a slightly different accent. I wonder what types of calling services he would favor? Will he take my messages when I’m busy? There are plenty of thought-provoking ideas surrounding the entire concept.

And, though just the tip of the iceberg, this is what Voice 2.0 is all about. The opportunity for innovative services and applications that meld your online and offline lives (or should that be virtual and real personas?) will be plentiful. And that (what Jeff Pulver refers to as a purple minute), not free or cheaper calls, is what makes the Voice 2.0 revolution an exciting and promising place to be.

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Related: Time Magazine, CNET, Wired, Laptop Magazine