Who's not living in the real world?

I don't know why the old Blondie song came to mind when I thought about what to call this post, but even if you're NOT living in the real world you can now phone up someone who is.

Vodaphone has announced a beta product in Second Life. It's a mobile phone service that allows an avatar to phone out of SL to anyone in the real world. How cool is that? I can't wait for Yazzara Robbiani to make his first call to some unsuspecting Earth dweller. You can read more about it here but trust me, all the official news articles I've read about this have written it up so confusingly that you may as well just stick with me.

The service is called Inside Out and it will be free until Nov. 30 (none of the reports I saw said what the subsequent cost would be). Apparently there are Inside Out vending machines in SL as we speak that dispense free phones that enable the service.

Inside Out also lets you call other avatars, but you can do that already without a handset. People outside SL will be able to phone up avatars, and you'll be able to send and receive text messages as your avatar too. But the reports I read weren't clear about whether the text message function works "Inside Out" of SL, so to speak, or how in fact it does work.

Vodaphone's Inside Out service really puts the exclamation point on the fascinating interaction between RL and SL that makes it all really OL (one life) that I started writing about in the Rissa Maidstone post.

And let's close with the immortal words of Blondie:
Every day you've got to wake up
And disappear behind your makeup,
Hey, I'm livin' in a magazine,
Page to page in my teenage dream,
Cause I'm not livin' in the real world.
No I'm not livin' in the real world No more.
No more. No more!