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Rosedale was an early pioneer of “streaming media”, the technology behind moving images on the internet. In 1996, aged 27, he made his first fortune selling his video-conferencing firm FreeVue to RealNetworks, the software company behind the RealPlayer internet video technology. He went on to be RealNetworks’ chief technology officer, but at night his dreams were of virtual worlds.

Since his teens, Rosedale has been fascinated by the possibility of creating new worlds with computers. He believes the technology will soon exist for us to create a parallel existence every bit as “real” as reality. And, he argues, better. Even now, when Second Life is an often awkward cartoon, “It’s not at all clear to me that it is better here than there,” Rosedale says. He recalls one night when he was a teenager, playing with a computer program that generated the famous organic Mandelbrot fractal pattern. He and a friend were zooming in on smaller and smaller portions of it. At one point they had zoomed so far in, Rosedale calculated, that in proportion, the original image would now be equivalent to the surface of the Earth.

Rosedale was also fascinated by the idea of cellular automatons – computer simulations of living organisations pioneered by the Cambridge mathematician John Conway and his Game of Life. In the game, cells live, die or multiply based on a few mathematical rules. Cyberspace was not only huge, but capable of supporting life.

Then in 1992 his wife, Yvette, gave him a copy of Snow Crash, a sci-fi novel by Neal Stephenson. “‘Here’s another crazy guy who’s into what you’re into,’ she said,” says Rosedale.

Snow Crash tells the tale of a computer whiz (the punningly named Hiro Protagonist) who lives a dual life. In the real world he is a pizza-delivery guy, but in the virtual-reality “metaverse” he is the world’s top sword-fighter and a hero of the hacker community. Stephenson’s metaverse isn’t just a game, it’s the web in 3-D. Maps come as globes that you can zoom in on (an idea more than a decade ahead of Google Earth); people hold meetings in their online offices and meet their friends as their virtual selves in online bars.

Stephenson’s vision of the internet was as a place where people met virtual face to virtual face. Today’s internet is described as “Flatland”.

“Every time you are on Amazon, there are 10,000 other people there too. What if you could see them and talk to them?” says Rosedale. As in Snow Crash, today’s flat internet universe will be superseded by a 3-D landscape where we can meet, shop and chat like we can in the real world. Second Life is not a game, as far as Rosedale is concerned: it’s the future of the internet.

()There are other – hugely popular – online games where people create their own characters and play out their lives online. The biggest is World of Warcraft, a sword-and-sorcery game in which elves, wizards, witches and orcs go on quests to save fair maidens or plunder caves full of treasure. Wow, as it is appropriately known, has 7m players worldwide, all paying to play.

Second Life, so its fans insist, is not a game. Rosedale sees the company as part of the new wave of internet companies – known as Web 2.0.

Residents create their own world – “user-generated content” in the buzz phrase of the moment. It’s not given to them as it is in Wow. They build their own homes, play their own music, put their pictures on the wall. Second Life has more in common with another Web 2.0 firm, MySpace, than the average video game.

Most Web 2.0 companies make money from advertising; Second Life’s income is far weirder than that. A basic Second Life account is free. Linden Lab makes money leasing land to residents at about $20 a month per “acre”. Buying an island can cost more than $1,200; then there are monthly maintenance fees on top. The land mass of Second Life is now about 60,000 acres and is growing at 8% a month.

The company does not release financial details, but is probably loss-making now and burning through its investment phase. However, Rosedale has said he thinks the company can make a profit from its land sales alone.