Jusr saw this over on GigaOM and I have to say I really love this great post titled: Real World of Warcraft: Is Offline Part of the Plan?
A real-world MMO has one more advantage: Revenues. The opportunities for sponsorship, or for driving players to real-world locations to make real-world purchases, make Blizzard’s current revenues look tiny by comparison.
I think the Offline world is often overlooked when it comes to Online worlds and social media sites and the fact that it is very impotant to link the On- and Offline worlds together, let them interact.
Some of this is certainly happening with e.g. Facebook, Google, Yahoo! [… you name it] dev events, but why not for “everyone”, the normal user?