Virtual world Second Life has just introduced a beta designed specifically for businesses that will open up new opportunities for companies to hold virtual meetings and trade virtual goods - especially products based on business collaboration needs.

The new corporate option, "Second Life Enterprise,"  will enable companies to run the site on their own network behind their own firewall, adding an extra layer of security to encourage such trading and more use in general.

Consumer Disinterest

The online community's popularity - at least among consumers - peaked in 2007 when Facebook and MySpace took off, but has waned since then. But several businesses, including IBM, are still fond of the Linden Lab creation. In Q309, a total of $150 million changed hands in user-to-user transactions, a 4% growth over the same quarter in 2008. It has also proved economical for users. IBM's Academy of Technology, in one example, saved $320,000 earlier this year by using Second Llife to hold two large meetings.

Collaborative Sweet Spot

Now that Second Life has faded from popular view, collaboration appears to have become the site's sweet spot. Because it offers more interaction than a conference call or webinar and enables participants to interact with each other in 3-D, Linden Lab claims that 1,000 companies now use it for training, meetings and conferences - and take the protocol very seriously. Gartner recently projected that by the end of 2013, 70% of companies that use virtual worlds will have established dress codes and other codes of behavior for the employee avatars.

Virtual Goods Growth

The corporate world may indeed be fertile ground for well-targeted virtual goods, which appear to be gaining popularity across a number of social media platforms. In one example, website Slide - which began as a downloadable desktop program to index photos - has changed its focus to creating virtual worlds for specific demographics (think SuperPoke Pets for soccer moms) and selling virtual goods on them.

Slide's revenue model, in fact, shifted from 90% advertising to more than 50% virtual goods in the past year, according to CEO Max Levchin (via All Business).

Such figures support a recent study by the editors at InsideFacebook.com and Serious Business, which found that the virtual goods industry is on track to become a $1 billion business this year, and is expected to balloon to an estimated $1.6 billion in 2010.