Hot on the heels of a cover article on “How Second Life and Google Earth are Merging into One Metaverse” (password required) in the MIT Technology Review, a series of rumours that, well, Second Life and Google…

First, Google is clearly eyeing plans to enter this space. In January, a Benchmark investor said:

Heard an interesting rumor today from an academic who heard through the PhD grapevine…Google is working on turning Google Earth into a virtual world a la SecondLife (full disclosure: Benchmark investment) . That would be an interesting development both for Google. After hearing this, I was struck by the language on the Google Earth website: “One more step to creating a life-like 3-D model of the whole planet..”

Now, students in Arizona report that they were asked to participate in a user test of a virtual world.

Arizona State University’s students have the opportunity to test a new product “that will be publicly launched later this year”. The invitation page mentions that the product is developed by “a major Internet company” and there are hints that the application is related to social networking, 3D modeling and video games. To complete the questionnaire and get the opportunity to test the product, you need to be a student at ASU.

The ever brilliant and insightful Nobody Fugazi speculates that a true competitor to Second Life by Google seems unlikely.

While Google may be interested in social spaces my suspicion is that their interests are in tagging, collecting and making accessible the linkages between social spaces. If they were to leverage anything it’s unlikely they’ll get into ‘virtual environments’ design (at least in the short term) and more likely to focus on leveraging SketchUp and Google Earth.

I’ll leave Google speculation to others, it seems like there’s a whole industry devoted to reading the latest Google tea leaves. Regardless of where Google ends up going, it points to a few seeming evident facts about the metaverse:

- It will be everywhere
- Competitors will rise and fall, advantages will come and go, one piece of technology or approach to policy will leap-frog one site over another, and suites of applications will make building 3-D micro-worlds as common as posting a Facebook profile
- Being everywhere, it will lead to disenchantment by the early adopters in the short term and then become commonplace in the long term (kind of like e-commerce, and the rise and eventual fall of blogs (tongue in cheek))
- You can approach the metaverse as a business problem or you can approach it as a tool for creativity, or you can pursue your individual passions. Trying to stay ahead of the curve will be a rough and tumble game with a few Amazon.coms and a lot of Pets.com left in the wake of change
- Second Life will rise or fall based primarily based on policy. Policy will drive acceptance of SL as a ’semi open’ platform. Policy backed up by sound technology are the only tickets to survival for our Linden friends, other than the more obvious strategy of selling the whole thing off. SL the next Compuserve - absorbed, diluted, disappeared, a tale of failed promise and a few slightly wealthier and maybe wiser Californians? Or SL the next Yahoo - still around, still a hub, still a place for community and access to information but not quite the hungry little upstart it once was?

Time will tell, in the meantime a wave out to our friends at Google!