Electric Sheep's WebFlock and Google's Lively

Today, the Electric Sheep Company announced their new service WebFlock, quickly on the heels of another similar announcement last week by Google and their Lively offering.

Although both are steps in the right direction, I believe that the Electric Sheep got it right and Google did not.

The ESC'ers recognized from their experience in Second Life and There.com that one of the largest issues with use of social virtual spaces is the software download and configuration required.  Although this is fine when the technology is still in enthusiast (read 'geek') mode, it fails to cross the chasm to the general population as the deployment gets too complex.  This negates the network effect of 'the more subscribers, the more value to the platform' which make these spaces compelling.

Lively, by contrast, requires a custom software download which will limit it's market penetration and may raise other issues already experienced by first and second generation virtual world platforms with regards to application integrity, secruity, and firewall traversal.

By leveraging Adobe Flash, WebFlock has an opportunity to sneak it's way into the market and your everyday life in the form of FaceBook applications, Twitter #topic rooms, and the like.  Smart.

Neither platform supports native voice integration at this time, which was a major growth catalyst for Second Life when spatial voice was launched.

Sadly, the recent shelving of Transmutable and the Ogoglio project (which leveraged Java3D instead of Flash, and is thankfully still available as an open source project) was a step back for the industry.  Hopefully the Sheepers will be able to stay the course and infect as many mainstrem sites with social virtual spaces as they can.  This will have the immediate benefit of allowing everyday social interactions to benefit from 3d spaces, as well as pave the road for walking these spaces in the backdoor of corporations (as was the case with Instant Messaging and Skype) for business uses as well.

I'll be watching this space with interest as we are leveraging social virtual spaces for expert roundtables as part of the Technology Intelligence Group.  I hope we get to use one of these technologies with integrated voice soon (hint hint).

Comments

[Anxiety Cures]

An interesting post. It will be interesting to see how this develops.