Most of us still use email clients rather than webmail because we recognise that the capabilities of email applications for the most part far surpass that of webmail.

Why do people think virtual world clients are somehow any different?

Why on earth would you want to shoehorn a fully immersive 3D environment into a 2D browser with all of it’s limitations?

The only people that really benefit from web based virtual spaces are marketing people and corporations. I suppose for that reason, we won’t see the format disappearing anytime soon even if it brings little (if any) benefit to the user.

Sure, maybe a ‘lite’ web based client for IM’s and chat might be handy at a push but to get that full immersion you need a real client.

And Profoky is completely right about Second Lifes ‘walled garden’. SL is still here after so many other virtual world have faltered is because of it’s user generated content, its economy and its IP rights. All of these would be extremely hard to manage without its ‘garden wall’.

In an open system, who polices intellectual property? How will micro-payments work between sims? Will I need a dozen different currencies to get around or will they need something like a micro-Paypal?

To be honest though, I like Second Life BECAUSE it’s separated from the Real World. The more they try to integrate it into the rest of webdom, the less appealing it will become.

And people also do not realise that Second Life is a ground breaking technology. Sure, as far as MMO’s go it isnt that grand but thats the point, its MORE than an MMMO… its a platform, its an environment its not just another virtual world….

Not a single one of these entities — some of them still in alpha or beta — have economies. Buy/sell interfaces connected to real currency in real life. Nor do some of them have user-generated content. Those that do, like Activeworlds or There lost a lot of their users to Second Life for various reasons.

The walled garden of SL looks far better to you after two hours fooling around in Lively where you cannot sell anything or buy land or do anything but goof around in a constricting “room”.

Let’s say there are 269 million people registered for Lively now. So, Google will sell them ads? Will they let people put AdSense up in their rooms? What is it but a mere freebie ad on that maybe helps Google get paid but not the user?

Contrast SL with only 380,000 people in a month who spent more than a dollar — but there is a long tail of people who made money — real cash — from real services and content, not merely from being data-scraped or being doormats for ads. That is of inestimable worth.

You are so used to doing this horrible knee-jerk spasm based on the original Internet, where Compuserve and AOL and Geocities and all the walled gardens are shot at dawn, that you forget that the next iteration may not really care about this distinction as much as you Web 1.0 geeks do. Who really cares about walking between worlds? That’s a total geek affectation. Nobody in an SL McMansion wants to walk into a WoW raid, or go and sit Ruthed in opensimulator with no economy (there’s no buy/sell interface or permissions for content creation).

Only people selling the connector widgets (IBM, Cisco, whatever) or the big grid hook-up (Linden Lab) care about interop — the masses do not, and the top content creator class do not because it horribly threatens their intellectual property rights when anyone can save their sim offline and suck copies out even more easily than they can now — and into worlds with no economy/permissions.

There is in fact a big debate now about how IP might be protected with a flags system or some form of obfuscation and of course the usual goofs are demanding CC licenses be welded into the viewer. Sigh.

Walled gardens keep the integrity of communities and content. Why the rush to destroy them? To what end? When there is no overall architecture of a 3-D web really conceived as a platform that can be monetarized as the earlier web is.

And…the Internet? Like…I need to hook up to that better when it is just…in the other window? I mean, seriously. You’re too close to this stuff. Worlds are good. Stop interop. Save the economy.

http://pixelsebi.com/2008-07-0.....al-worlds/

I haven’t tried the new ones, but I would be amazed if they don’t introduce some sort of virtual marketing.