The Sims Online may have survived infamy, but it couldn't stand in the face of apathy. And so, when it became clear to Electronic Arts that the online game was hemorrhaging players, they pulled the proverbial plug. The remaining faithful tugged up their virtual world bootstraps and moved on, many to Second Life, and re-established their communities in another world.

But through the pipeline, word has it that TSO is to be relaunched as EA-Land, with features that drag it into the current internet marketplace: new social networking facilities (already a strong-point in the original game), user-generated content, a new economy and faster bandwidth. And this isn't a fan-developed project, it comes from the bowels of Maxis/EA.

Most exciting are their web integration features - a key next stage in the virtual worlds landscape. From their website:

The internet has changed so much since the launch of The Sims Online in December 2002, we had to change the way we think about online games. We have opened the access to most of the in game information to the internet through web services. For example this enables you to add Google or Yahoo widgets to your computer (or iPhone!) and see if your favorite lots or friends are online.

We are providing you with privacy settings so you can decide if or which of your avatar will broadcast what information to the internet. Sims User web sites are already using this feature to create some amazing community sites. We also built avatarbook, to show how that information can be seen and connected to social web sites like Facebook.

Original TSO players can re-launch their accounts and settle back into their homesteads, already merged into EA-Land. And all this for free. Is this the future?