Third and Fourth Life?

By now almost anyone with any technical savvy has heard of Second Life. For the few who haven’t, Second Life is a virtual online world. Unlike just about every other virtual online world, the makers of Second Life don’t provide content for you to collect, kill, race, destroy or otherwise interact with. What they do provide are tools for you to make your own content and a virtual currency so you can buy/sell it from/to other users. This currency can be traded for real U.S. dollars on their custom exchange so that developers can actually profit from their creations.

Second Life is pretty amazing and has received plenty of recognition as “the next big thing”, but I’ve always felt there were a few things holding it back from widespread acceptance. First is a heavy bandwidth requirement – pages load slowly just because that many 3-D objects are enough to clog up most users’ networks. Second, 3-D creation tools are complicated enough to stump the average user. And finally, new users need to download a client just for this purpose. Eventually, I thought at one time, the technology will catch up enough to eliminate the first two as issues (and the third one isn’t that big) and Second Life will supplant the World Wide Web. Although that "eventually" seemed to be a ways off.

However, two new software projects are underway that might change all that: Whirled and MetaPlace. Both of them allow users to create their own content. Both plan to have their own currency that can be exchanged for real currency. Most importantly, both of them are web-based. Most web-based content is more segregated, and smaller, so bandwidth should no longer be an issue. Web-based content is generally much easier to create than 3-D content, so the learning curve of the editing tools is far less of a barrier. Finally, all content can be accessed by anyone who has a web browser (meaning everyone) with no additional client download and can presumably can use links to and be linked from existing web pages.

Both projects are currently in Alpha. I think whichever gets to market first will have a huge edge in becoming widely adopted. I could also imagine either or both being adopted/bought/merged with one of the major social networking sites. It will be interesting to see what happens.