vLES Now Open

vLES.com
MTV’s new online music community, the virtual Lower East Side (vLES.com) is now open to the public. (I don’t know why, but I thought this was old news… maybe it is).

Like their flesh-and-blood counterparts, the computer-generated residents of VLES (which opened to the public last week) are free to walk a familiar gritty strip between Houston and Rivington Streets, befriend one another, watch music videos, hang out at rock shows, form their own bands and get into as much after-hours miscreancy as the Web site’s programmers will allow.

For more than two years the channel has been building a collection of Second Life-style virtual reality Web sites with the goal of competing with popular two-dimensional social networks like MySpace and Facebook… [NYTimes.com]