I arrived home today to find a large box on my front porch. When I realized it was a flower delivery, my mind raced trying to figure out who on earth would send me flowers. My husband’s a fabulous man, but his flowers generally are delivered in person so chances were good that it wasn’t him.

Who was it? Let’s watch this video and find out:

Oh yes my friends. I received flowers from Twinity. To congratulate me on the purchase of my new apartment. My VIRTUAL apartment. In Twinity. Dear God, that is brilliant. BRILLIANT.

I am loving the “crossover” that I’m seeing more and more between virtual environments and offline marketing. First I saw Circuit City with their iPod Nano giveaway (find it in SL, get one in RL) and now a ‘real life’ gesture perfectly normal for a house-warming being used on a virtual home purchase as well. I really love that idea. I think that we’re seeing a lot more instances of the mixing of online and offline communities, merchandise and marketing. Maybe people are finally starting to understand that all of our online relationships, experiences and communities truly do have a ‘real’ component.

Good job, Twinity. I’m impressed.

Today was a big day for virtual worlds.

* IBM and Second Life have managed to figure out how to have an avatar move from Second Life to Open Sim.

* Vivaty announces public beta with Facebook and AIM

* Google announces their own virtual world, Lively.

These are all pretty big things.  Interoperability is something that’s been discussed for a while now and the idea of allowing avatars to move freely from one virtual world to another is a pretty sweet thing.  With as scattered as I feel in the social media realm these days, the ability to have just one avatar, one identity, that’s able to move around .. makes me happy.

Vivaty and Lively are virtual worlds that are web-based and they both allow you to create your own ’scenes’ and interact with others. There’s a lot of customization in both – you can change how your room looks, move furniture around, pick new clothes/hair for your avatar.  Vivaty works with Facebook and AIM and Lively is its own thing that you can embed in your own website.  Both very cool, both with a lot of potential.

I don’t see myself using either Vivaty or Lively much right now for a few reasons. The main reason is that both are PC-only at this point and I spend most of my ‘free time’ on my Mac. I’m sure it’s being worked on and I sure hope so.  The PC only stuff makes me cranky.  If we can get people to move from one virtual world to another, surely we can get these things to work on a mac.