WooMe, the online network for fast, virtual introductions recently secured another sizable round of funding and is closing in on 100,000 users just a few months after its launch. The site offers a place to host or join back to back speed sessions with people, live in voice and video.

WooMe is very easy to use and gets right down to its business: making people introductions faster and easier. Access to rich profiles prior to discussions, a privilege competitor Speeddate does not grant, makes the selection process slightly less hit-or-miss. In addition, within sessions, users can list their interests or preferred discussion topic keywords so that other Wooers can instantaneously relate.

This feature certainly facilitates discussion and alleviates some of the awkwardness of speed dating. When thinking about first dates or introductions, one often conjures up the agonizing memories of nervously firing questions, desperately searching for common ground. WooMe displays that common ground just as the first word is uttered.

Furthermore, much like the Facebook application Define Me, Wooers can choose words to describe each other. These tags are used on personal profiles to build reputations. These basic networking tools provide a decent amount of metadata to make the process of meeting people more enjoyable and relevant.

As others have suggested, WooMe has the potential to expand beyond speed dating. Interviewing for all sorts of purposes seems to be the logical step toward advancing the service, but I’m not convinced that it is the right environment—at least not currently. When I began interviewing for jobs, I made sure to update my various social networking profiles accordingly, removing information I felt might be deemed inappropriate by company insiders.

Access to my profiles is permission based, but there was always that looming “But what if…?” If WooMe is to become a site for professional recruitment, access to profiles, defining characteristics and interests is going to have to be regulated because I don’t see an employer particularly appreciating an interest in “foreplay” or “kinky” as a defining characteristic. Or maybe he or she will, depending on the company—only kidding.

The point is, if WooMe is to become a trusted platform for meeting other professionals, it will have to address the issue of the service’s inherently casual nature. I doubt LinkedIn or Monster would be the success it is today if social or more personal information were readily available to users within the service.

But in the meantime, if you are into speed dating or other types of quick and casual conversations, give WooMe a spin.

The Wall Street Journal has a great article about the shutdown of the Second Life banks. For those unaware of what Second Life is, it is a virtual world in which users can create their own custom avatars and participate in all the same activities that they do in real life. It is currently the most active virtual world on the web with over 187,000 active users in the U.S. alone and tens of thousands of active users in countries across Europe, Asia and South America.

In the whole scheme of things, Second Life is still extremely small in comparison to the massive social network behemoths MySpace and Facebook but there are some extremely dedicated users on the site. One of the key components of Second Life is the virtual currency that can be used to purchase products and services throughout the virtual world. A few groups took it upon themselves to open up banks within the virtual world and promised extremely high interest rates, one of which offered a 200 percent yearly interest rate.

That bank currently owes depositors $20,000 and claims that they will be repaying depositors the remaining amount. While $20,000 is absolutely nothing for a real-world bank, $20,000 is substantial for a bank owned by one individual. Linden Labs, the creators of SecondLife, announced two weeks ago that they would be shutting down the privately run banks and as a result there was a run on the banks. It appears that rather than the same thing that happened prior to the great depression, these virtual banks are actually capable of honoring all depositors requests.

The Wall Street Journal describes one of the individual bank owners, Joshua Zarwel, who is a 29-year-old graduate student in New York:

Mr. Zarwel’s avatar, named Teufel Hauptmann, used the deposits — averaging $25 per user — to buy and sell Linden dollars on the Second Life currency exchange, known as the LindeX. He says he parlayed his currency arbitrage into about $15,000 in actual profit. “It started as a hobby and grew into something more,” he says.

Joshua was able to pay depositors a significant 24 to 30 percent per year, far beyond the interest rate provided by any real-world bank. It appears as though the Second Life banks have become more of an educational experiment for financial buffs rather than significant institutions. For the time being, Second Life will be able to avoid a great depression while in the real world we try to stave of a significant recession.