ON POINT

Walker Spaight of the SL Herald just launched a new metaverse blog with a broader outlook (one that will presumably not include Page Six nudie avatar spreads.)  "3pointD" is more like a journalistic adjunct to the tweedy ruminations of Terra Nova, providing a resource on the emergence of what Spaight, like a lot of people in the field, call not online worlds or MMORPGS, but "the 3D Web".

So while we're on that tip, I might as well use the opportunity to inject my own hang-wringing word of caution about this whole "Web 3.0" terminology I keep reading.  Now, I'm just as guilty when I'm speaking about Second Life with the uninitiated of saying stuff like, "It's the next generation of the Web-- like the Web, just in 3D!"  But really, that's just to get the audience past what I call the conceptual WTF stumbling block.  As in, "WTF should I care about some online game?", or that adorable chestnut, "Second Life?  WTF, I'm too busy with my first life to care about that!"  If you respond that it's the next generation of the Web (and ten years later, the average computer user finally gets what that means) you have their attention for at least the next few minutes.

But leave all that to one side.  We may need to call it Web 3.0 to the outside world, but something is lost, in my view, if we take on that talk amongst ourselves.  Lost is the dream of creating not just another software platform, but a world, with its own social and economic rules-- which are at least slightly better then the rules we leave behind, when we log in-- where not just broadband and a decent 3D card, but unfettered imagination, is a prequisite for citizenship. 

Can we have that and Web 3.0?  Maybe.  And maybe if we keep calling it Web 3.0, we'll get just that-- not an alternate world, but a somewhat more immersive, somewhat more interactive version of the Web.  (Which leads right to a next generation platform war, Netscape vs. Explorer vs. Firefox evolving into SL vs. Active Worlds vs. Cyworld, and won't that be wonderful?)

Anyway, a conversation for another space.  Like, say, on 3pointD.com.

Comments

[Mark Wallace]

Hey, thanks for the link, Hamlet!

I'm sticking with 3pointD as the blanket term for all online things 3D-like, or that connect our 3D offline world to similar places on the Web.

*ponders whether to change the tagline to "The 3pointD world, as blogged by..." etc.

[Jim Purbrick]

Heh, for some of us who mucked around with VR before it went online, the web but in 3D evokes visions of VRML that are a lot less exciting than visions of online games.

The big problem with the original web in 3D was that it was largely single user: you modelled a car in 3D and stuck it on a web page.

The exciting thing about online games are they have collaboration and communities and all that good stuff. All the things that are exciting about Web 2.0.

So, maybe we need to talk about Web 3.0 being Web 2.0 plus 3D to make sure we get everybody excited. Web + Communities + 3D = Web 3.0

Or something.

[Frans Charming]

He Jim, that was what i wanted to suggest aswell. Figure out which community/hive/spaces trend they are involved with and say, "It's like that but 3D!".