We’ve all heard about Second Life. I loved it, but it didn’t “stick” for a whole bunch of reasons. Meaning, it didn’t go mainstream, even though it had a HUGE amount of hype. Why not? Well, it was an island that you had to go into. Problem is, only gamers do that and Second Life wasn’t enough of a game. World of Warcraft came along and took a lot of the gamers away from it. My son used to be really interested in Second Life and for the past year he’s been playing World of Warcraft.

Another reason? It wasn’t accessible from the Web. You couldn’t get into a Second Life scene from a Web site until you downloaded the app, signed up, and all that. Even then it took forever to start up and just wasn’t a Web-compatible experience.

Another reason? Each island could only have 75-100 people on it. Company after company told me they were really excited by Second Life, but after they hit this limitation their excitement went way down. Why? Because few companies were going to spend the money to build a really compelling island to only have 75 people able to partake. The ROI just wouldn’t be there.

So, what’s next? Well, a variety of companies are trying to come up with 3D schemes that will overcome these issues.

Vivaty, today, comes out with one answer. It’s too early to claim they’ve nailed it (they haven’t yet, especially because they haven’t gotten a Mac client out yet) but they get very close to building something really interesting that’ll get a lot of corporate types interested.

Last week I interviewed Vivaty’s CEO with my cell phone during which he gave me a demo of how it all works. It’s very cool. My blog or Facebook page could have a 3D scene embedded on it, and you could “dive into” the scene and walk around. These scenes are very graphically rich. I could put videos, photos, and other details around, along with prebuilt furniture and other things.

One disappointment? Right now it’s a Windows only thing and requires Internet Explorer. Firefox support is coming “within weeks” and Macintosh support is being built out, but probably won’t be here until sometime around the end of the year. That alone will keep the hype down on Vivaty, because most of the top bloggers I know are now using Macs.

Anyway, this is worth checking out, just to see the latest in stage of the art 3D worlds.

What do you think?

Before I started the interview with Kyle McSlarrow, CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, I joked with him that he’s the most hated man in America, because everyone hates their cable company. He took that in stride and we dug in and talked about the state of broadband, how USA compares to Korea and other countries, and all sorts of issues like what cable is becoming and what his view of the technology industry is.

This is one of the Washington DC interviews we did.

We hear a lot of villification of this group in the media, so it’s nice to sit down and hear his point of view on a wide range of things. I love how he blamed me for using too much bandwidth at one point at about 17 minutes into the video.

Compare his responses on broadband and network neutrality to those from when I interviewed Representative Ed Markey or my interview with Representative Zoe Lofgren. You can see a rift, even if it’s a nuanced one.

Discussion of this video has already started on FriendFeed. How about you, what do you think of the interviews we got in Washington DC so far? (a few more are coming soon)

Personally I came away with a lot better impression of the cable industry after this interview. What about you?