Brands, corporations, entrepeneurs – everyone wants a slice of Web 2.0…to influence the blogs, create the next viral campaign, protect and extend their IP. Virtual worlds have been alternately viewed as games, a diversion, a brand experience platform, and an extension of 2.0.

But the metaverse (I use the roadmap’s definition) goes exponentially beyond all of these and, I believe could continue to help overturn what today constitutes a corporation.

Napster represented the tip of the iceberg and bus loads of lawyers were sent out to protect corporate intellectual property.

But technology has taken us further, and with virtual worlds, we add to the soup the disruption of ideas, identity (including brand identity), borders, and meaning using tools where not only is the media product “mashable” by the users, but the environment in which it’s “read” can be mashed up as well. With YouTube, users have co-opted the tools of the media. With virtual worlds, they can increasingly co-opt and craft their own universes in which to interact. As Castranova posits, there is a migration happening.

And while the corporations move towards controlling, manipulating, and leveraging this migration, there is an equally strong counter-trend built on open source, creativity, passion, and a distributed metaverse which could slip out of corporate and government hands. (Even SL, which will likely be gobbled up some day by a larger hungrier cousin, can’t control the Croquet/OpenSim tools that are increasingly in the hands of intelligent and thoughtful people).

Against this backdrop, it’s no wonder companies would like some clue as to how to approach virtual worlds, and why they’re increasingly leaning to closed off islands or separate worlds of their own (witness the Disney announcement of a CARS virtual world) where they have complete control of the content.

The early pioneers of “post-game” virtual worlds have carved out tools, technologies and approaches that are pointers to the years ahead. From initiatives like CSI New York in Second Life (SL), in world successes like Greenies from Rezzable, and the reaction to Anshe Chung’s 10 Linden “Wal*Mart”-like flooding of the market with virtual goods, it’s clear that different models and approaches will evolve, thrive, and fail.

The metaverse will be as deep as it is wide. This gives companies strategic options and a wide range of tactical approaches. But it’s my deep belief that these strategic options should be made against a deeper, more nuanced understanding of where the metaverse might take us…because all bets are truly off.

For evidence, I offer this and ask what China might know that Western governments haven’t keyed into:

China’s low-key announcement last week of its Five Year Plan for its manufacturing industry (includes) plans to use 3-D interactive virtual worlds as the interface with future customers. The virtual worlds will be tightly coupled with real-life manufacturing and distribution industries, enabling buyers to customise their orders at low cost.

Above all, as with the Japanese 5th Generation Programme, the Chinese approach has been globally oriented from the start, with buy-in at the highest levels of government and industry. There has been a three-year planning period with considerable discussion and consensus building. Leadership is clear and the programme is a jointly funded government/industry venture.

Corporate-Centric Brand Protection
For business, virtual worlds offer the opportunity to create experiences and platforms through which they can communicate with customers – to educate, inform, engage, and reinforce brand messages. But corporations have been singing from the branding song book for a long time. Control of the brand message and the brand experience is a religion.

The Web 2.0 leaves corporations off balance – in a world where a kid in their basement can create a more popular ad than an agency in New York, who will control brands? Think of it as the Napster-ization of corporate brands.

Conferences that promise to give corporations the ‘social Web secrets’ are the hot ticket. Corporations are promised the secret of creating viral campaigns, for an understanding of this wired-up generation of Facebook pokers, for optimizing ‘eyeballs’ amongst the mySpace generation.

The puzzle of Web 2.0 is how to control and influence a brand’s representation in what often seems like a chaotic, unruly space. I would respond by saying that a) it’s only going to get worse as virtual worlds reach the tipping point and open source tools allow their development anywhere at any time and b) the model of enforcement and control, like in music (in spite the busloads of lawyers) may well be dead on arrival.

Businesses struggle to make sense of the “social Web” and virtual worlds seem like they’re from the same field of strategic discussion. But the road ahead may be far stranger than most companies are bargaining for.

Today’s Metaverse Is Only a Peek Down the Rabbit Hole

Pervasive – The Metaverse will be Everywhere
Philip Linden recently said that “virtual worlds will be more pervasive than the Web”.

The Metaverse Roadmap echoes this point:
The emergence of a robust Metaverse will shape the development of many technological realms that presently appear non-Internet-related. In manufacturing, 3D environments offer ideal design spaces for rapid-prototyping and customized and decentralized production. In logistics and transportation, spatially-aware tags and real-time world modeling will bring new efficiencies, insights, and markets. In artificial intelligence, virtual worlds offer low-risk, transparent platforms for the development and testing of autonomous machine behaviors, many of which may be also used in the physical world. These are just a sampling of coming developments based on early stage Metaverse technologies.

In other words, virtual worlds will exist side-by-side with the ‘real’ and will often be untethered from the Web. The implication is that while we think of the Internet as a global, pervasive medium, the metaverse has the possibility of extending its reach far beyond the boundaries of where we believe it is possible to bring information.

Media channels were once clear and fairly contained. They either existed with a physically contained object (a newspaper, magazine), a geographic area (a TV market, a metropolitan newspaper market), or time (prime time TV). Much like the Internet, the Metaverse challenges geographic, space or time-based concepts. But it extends this exponentially because it will exist in both parallel, separate, mirrored and augmented virtual spaces.

Persistent – If Metaverse is Always On, Our Avatars will Begin to Exist Without Us There
My mental model of the Web is something like an electrical grid through which information flows – all I need to do is find a plug and the information is mine (with wireless just being a slightly more portable, invisible plug into the same thing).

We will not unplug from the metaverse, nor plug in, we will simply make decisions about how/whether to view it and how much effort to exert in influencing it.

The metaverse will exist around us through information shadows layered on top of the real (augmented reality) – our choice will be whether to turn on our “viewer” to see these shadows. And….critically important, it will persist without us. Sure, the Internet continues to exist without our viewing it.

But in the metaverse, avatars represent an advance that goes far deeper than how we personally represent ourselves to others in 3D spaces – they are extensions of ourselves, our agents, and they will increasingly act without us. Avatars, as extensions of who we are, will begin to act consciously (as guided by increasingly complex code) on our behalf, in the absence of our conscious control (which opens a separate strand of discussion about consciousness itself and the “strange loop”).

This also upsets the traditional media view, and even the Web 2.0 perspective of target individuals who belong to target communities. As the Metaverse unfolds, corporations will face the interesting challenge of coming to an acceptance that they will also need to market to groups that are only PARTIALLY representative of real individuals. In other words, how to market to “avatar groups” who will represent a mix of real people, agents, extensions of individual personalities, substitutions for identity, augmentations, and mash-ups of multiple people and companies.

Virtual Worlds will Create New Class Distinctions
I believe it was Castranova who wrote about a future world where class difference might be defined by whether you are “in” a virtual world or not.

Imagine going to an entertainment event a few years from now. A singer. Music. Cool lights. And maybe even a little discussion with the audience, some banter back and forth. You go, you applaud, you chat with your friend after over coffee, and you go home.

Now imagine that the person sitting beside you is at the same event but, through a metaverse appliance (glasses, palm computer, etc.) is participating in the same event but while attending the concert can also “see” others who are attending virtually and instant message them, can click through a virtual overlay of the concert hall to visit a databank of past performances, a virtual store where they can download the songs being played and pick up a virtual concert t-shirt, sign up to join a virtual club where they’ll go dancing with others long after the concert is over, and can even participate in a live mash-up of the concert images and sounds which are simulcast to an adjoining virtual space as part of a user-generated art work which reinterprets, layers, extracts, riffs off the live performance.

Two people, one “live” concert, two radically different abilities to interact with the event in either its simplest or more complex interpretations.

Fair enough – maybe you don’t want all the additional info. All you wanted was a night out. A concert should be simple, in the moment, live, flesh-and-blood, and I have no argument with that. All the click-throughs and virtual spaces layered on top are suited to people with short attention spans or a need for an active, lively social community (I have a hard enough time focusing on ONE thing let alone trying to interact across worlds and chat at the same time).

But imagine that instead of a concert you’re attending a business meeting or conference – and you’re the only one in the room not tapped into that second “feed” of interaction, information, etc. Now, are you disadvantaged? Attend a conference or symposium in Second Life and you’ll quickly discover that the discussions taking place in IM are often a) more interesting and b) more valuable than the main “chat”.

There will be a divide between people who “get” virtual worlds and those who don’t. Between governments who understand them and those that don’t. And finally, between the approach to media channels and brand engagement – the concert now has multiple streams, and as much as the concert promoters and labels might want to control the experience, if it’s true that the Metaverse will become pervasive, they’ll have no more control over that than they’ve had over P2P file sharing.

Brand Solutions
All of which begs questions. If even a fraction of the above turns out to be true, and the success of “Web 2.0″ at reshaping the Internet landscape seems to indicate that there’s change afoot…then how will brands survive? The points of interaction with customers won’t just increase because the number of “worlds” will increase, but the number of customers will increase – you won’t just need to advertise to ME, you’ll also need to advertise to my various avatars and identities.

And for those “hapless” users worried about being innundated with the equivalent of floating banners on the SL mainland – what happens if they wake up and realize they have the REAL power?

What does the future digital ecosystem mean for companies, society, and individuals? What is ownership? What are the implications of openSource?

Perhaps technology has brought humanity through its own strange loop – moving through increasingly levels of complexity back to where we began – the control of content, change, adapatability and evolution brought back to the atomized level of the individual.