Virtual worlds will become the interface for the web. That is what Dr. Paulette Robinson, Assistant Dean for Teaching at the Information Resources Management College of National Defense University, said today during the Metanomics show. This sounds similar to what founder Philip Rosedale of Second Life is saying. I am not sure that those visions will become reality – the internet is shifting into another paradigm, related to what Rosedale sees as the future, but not (yet) the same.
Something is coming after the web, and it is coming soon. In previous posts I called it the Real Time Web. Now I have been reading a fascinating text which helps me to see more clearly what it is all about: Is The Stream What Comes After the Web? by Nova Spivack.
Introducing the Stream, Spivack writes:
The Internet began evolving many decades before the Web emerged. And while today many people think of the Internet and the Web as one and the same, in fact they are different. The Web lives on top of the Internet’s infrastructure much like software and documents live on top of an operating system on a computer.
And just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet, now something new is emerging on top of the Web: I call this the Stream.
The Stream is what the Web is thinking and doing, right now. It’s our collective stream of consciousness.
Perhaps the best example of the Stream is the rise of Twitter and other microblogging systems including the new Facebook. These services are visibly streamlike — they are literally streams of thinking and conversation. In reaction to microblogs we are also starting to see the birth of new tools to manage and interact with these streams, and to help understand, search, and follow the trends that are rippling across them.
He explains the evolution of the internet in rather metaphysical terms, for instance “If the Internet is our collective nervous system, and the Web is our collective brain, then the Stream is our collective mind. The nervous system and the brain are like the underlying hardware and software, but the mind is what the system is actually thinking.”
This way of thinking is fascinating (compare these ideas with the noosphere), but for now I’d prefer a more down to earth approach saying that the Stream is like a real time conversational layer on top of the web and the internet. This layer is now growing rapidly, as are the tools which help us to navigate that new layer.
It reminds me of the vision of Philip Rosedale. I formulated this vision in a previous post along these lines: the 3D world becomes the default option for the internet, while the web as we know it would be a part of that 3D universe. (Dr. Robinson would say that the virtual world becomes the interface for the web) The reason is because people are social. Instead of looking at things on their own, they often prefer engaging into conversations with others about what they see and experience.
The Stream as it develops now however, seems to confirm that vision of the social dimension of the internet, but the tools which are becoming so popular are not the deep immersive 3D environments, but 2D tools such as Twitter, Plurk, FriendFeed etc. As Spivack explains, these newer services are “even more 1-dimensional than normal websites: they are generally quite linear series of posts, and in they change faster than typical Websites — often many times per day or hour or minute.”
Wagner James Au seems to illustrate all this on GigaOm, in his post about Blerp. He explains:
Blerp is a social network that looks like it’s swallowed the entire web. Once you create an account and log in, the network is represented in a frame around your browser display, so every web site is viewed within it. Blerpers can add comments and widgets (YouTube videos, star ratings, etc.) around the edges of any given site. What this gives you is a web browsing experience that’s socially annotated and shared from the ground up, in a way that seems markedly richer and more pervasive than other social networks and annotation sites.
Blerp is a new property of RocketOn, the a virtual world and startup of the same name.
I don’t know whether Blerp will have any success. It seems obvious however that the real time conversational layer of the internet is expanding rapidly and is also becoming more sophisticated regarding the tools we use in that layer.
Is this Stream like it emerges now a kind of intermediate step towards the 3D interface of the internet? Or will the 2D conversational layer stay the dominant aspect of the internet? Whatever the answer will be (and I’d love to read or watch your answers), we talk here about the ecosystem virtual worlds live in (virtual worlds being part of the net and of the conversational structures).
Maybe something our Metanomics show could explore further!
Roland Legrand