Apple’s iTunes store is one of the most significant e-commerce projects on the ‘net, and anyone in the business should pay close attention to what they do. Next to Amazon, they’re probably the largest online merchant. Certainly one of the most successful, selling over a billion songs in its first year of operation, and causing a major shake-up of the music industry.

The big news is that they just overcame a major hurdle in dealing with one of the big record companies (EMI): they are now offering DRM-free music files for sale.

iTunes broke all of the rules when it came to the 80/20 rule, and was a major focus point in Chris Anderson’s famous book on Internet economics, The Long Tail.

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Some people are pretty enthusiastic about the idea of Second Life as a next-generation world wide web. I attended one talk at WWW2007 (part of Monday’s WOW Tutorial) that included a large segment on Second Life and its potential as an online marketing medium for business.

I got the impression that the speaker was just a big fan of the game. There is certainly some potential for marketing in the game, however there are also a lot of drawbacks to doing so, such as malicious users or unscrupulous competitors doing anti-social things with their virtual characters in front of your virtual storefront/presentation/sales-pitch/whatever.

A significant difference between the web and second life, that was not pointed out, is that Second Life is a virtual environment that is owned by a single company that controls all aspects of that environment. The web is decentralized and free. That is what makes the web special. If some open-source and distributed model that were similar to Second Life could emerge, then maybe there could be some resemblance.

Until then, however, I think that second life is really a fringe thing for people who really like their second lives, or who don’t much like their first ones.