Lindens announced SLim the other day:

"SLim significantly lowers the barriers between virtual world and real world communication and ensures that Second Life users will always be able to connect to friends, regardless of location or broadband connection. SLim is also a compelling tool for the Second Life enterprise offering, which will enable employees to communicate and collaborate with colleagues meeting inworld without having the Second Life application running.

It looks also a little like, well we gotta announce something at the conference.  We use Skype mainly for voice and chat these days as a collaboration tool.  It seems that Lindens have reacted to There.com new features announcement and announced this feature at the VW conference in LA.  So is LL chasing the "web community" world or the "virtual world" market--or are they really the same thing now?