A sad day for virtual worlds as two worlds are winding down.  First off is an announcement from There.com that while they are growing in membership, they are drastically declining in revenue.  Sadly, they’ve made the decision to close the doors on March 9th, less than 6 days from now.

But, at the end of the day, we can’t cure the recession, and at some point we have to stop writing checks to keep the world open. There’s nothing more we would like to avoid this, but There is a business, and a business that can’t support itself doesn’t work. Before the recession hit, we were incredibly confident and all indicators were “directionally correct” and we had every reason to believe growth would continue. But, as many of you know personally, the downturn has been prolonged and severe, and ultimately pervasive.

We’re very sorry to announce that There.com will be closing to the public at 11:59 PM on March 9th, 2010.

Second is the announcement that Oracle has decided against investing any more development resources into Project Wonderland.  ThinkBalm looks into it and wonders just how long Wonderland can stick around without any further investment.

While Yankelovich said that Wonderland supporters — particularly in the education sector — have stepped up to donate hardware and other resources to the project, these donations aren’t enough to fund substantial new development, marketing, and project coordination. Sid Banerjee of Indusgeeks summed it up this way: “While no big company is backing Wonderland, it would be difficult for Wonderland to compete as an enterprise grade platform. Though we still believe it can thrive as an open source platform for the education sector.”

But while these two products are winding down, not all is bad.  LindenLabs and Second Life are still reporting record growth, and SAIC did just buy Forterra OLIVE, so hopefully users of these virtual spaces will welcome newcomers transitioning from these two dying spaces.

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