The bells, the whistles, the buttons… the things that might look good on paper, but really won’t help your bottom line.

Business Week outlines a number of areas where you, as a small business owner, should NOT be wasting your time and money. They target maybe a dozen different well-known players, from Windows XP and Yahoo to open-source software and the green business movement. One area they particularly find disagreeable is virtual worlds:

There’s been a lot of hype around virtual societies like Second Life. Some big companies are taking this stupidity seriously and buying “real estate” to advertise products. These are the same big companies that spend big money on overpriced consultants and gold-painted corporate jets. Small business owners should ignore these virtual worlds-until they find a way for a virtual guy named “Knuckles” to beat the stuffing out of a real-life delinquent customer.

I had a “storefront” set up for a bit for one of the projects I’m active in — CrystalAir.com — and I’d have to agree with this evaluation. If you have the time to play around with it, it’s interesting and a possible source of branding — stress possible — but you really need to spend a lot of time in-world to “get” it and get your mind wrapped around it enough to be able to imagine the business possibilities of the platform.