This post is part of our Hottest Products of 2007 feature. Check out our other Hottest Products of 2007 posts and let us know which product you think is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

If you find life a little boring, stifling and basically bland, then you may be a prime candidate to check out one of this year's hottest properties. Second Life is for people who wish to expand the boundaries of their life experience. Second Life opens up opportunities (albeit virtual ones) that most people would never encounter in their own personal daily grind. Much of the "news" that surfaces in mainstream media regarding Second Life is just dicey, sensationalist spin. What we want to know about are the things that make Linden Lab's Second Life worthy for consideration as a product of the year.

A good place to start investigating is Second Life Insider, a blog dedicated to tracking that constantly changing virtual environment. For instance, did you know that Second Life has an economy of its own, which actually maintains an exchange rate against real American dollars? It's true, and according to Second Life Insider, on November 1, Second Life membership invested U.S. $1,372,000 into Linden dollars (the site's virtual currency) at an exchange rate of L$268.7 to one U.S. dollar. In fact, there was quite a moan put out by the IRS at the beginning of this year when they again realized that people do generate significant income in virtual spaces.

By some estimates, the economy of World of Warcraft is worth $200 million, while Second Life's economy has been recently valued at $64 million. Everquest generates so much in the way of economic value that its GDP has been rated at around $2600 per capita. Lots of that value comes from real-life buying and selling of virtual-life assets, like skills and items for characters, or the characters themselves. Many gaming aficionados make a modest living doing just that -- the IRS has even opined on the subject, so it must be worth something.

Wherever that economy takes place, it won't be on eBay anymore. Starting this week, eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY) has been delisting auctions for virtual property, in a move that many say is a ploy to avoid legal battles with the games' owners. They're using the IP excuse: the auction site already has a policy in place that sellers can't trade in a product unless he is "the owner of the underlying intellectual property, or authorized to distribute it by the intellectual property owner." While game players may be in possession of a certain skill, or have spent their good money and countless hours to develop a character, they don't "own" that in the legal sense -- all the IP rests with the company which created the game.

So auctions like this and this will soon be ended. Many game players don't seem too concerned, though; as Eliah Hecht says on WOW Insider, "all this will probably do is stop individual users from selling their accounts. Gold farmers, powerlevelers, and other secondary industries have their own sites, and presumably will not be hindered much by this." I'd love to have seen eBay's cost-benefit analysis on this one!