Only recently I heard about the immensly popular online-game "Second Life" - where literally millions of (real) people inhabit a virtual world - community-building in perfection. Statistics from October 2006 count more than 30.000 residents logged in every day!
IBM took up the idea of community building and invited more than 300.000 employees, partners and clients to form their own community - and develop new ideas for products and services (I found this interesting report in Newsweek!). IBM's boss declared that they will spend significant amounts (> 100 Million US$) on those ideas. Cute idea - let everybody from your workforce and partners help you to collect and shape ideas - that's a way to realize group-potential!
I hurried to open a (free!) secondlife account - meet me there (Zorg42).
Update (Sun. 26th): Frank (see comment) wrote about this stuff - and pointed to Entropia (which supports only Windows-XP clients, SecondLife supports both Windows and MacOS).
