A new take on virtual worlds

Mark Gibbs' Web site tips, plus network applications news headlines

Perhaps it is just because I'm old...well, old-ish...but most computer games have never really appealed to me much. It doesn't matter whether it's Tetris or BioShock, they mostly seem overly complex in comparison to the amount of "fun" they deliver, require the reaction time of a cheetah if you are to be successful, demand that you remember a load of otherwise useless information or develop unnatural motor skills, and they always leave me with the feeling that I'm just wasting time.

(To be honest the one game playing exception for me has been the Star Wars-derived “Pod Racer” game which I found incredibly entertaining despite the fact I’m no good at it at all.)

Anyway, these reasons may explain why most virtual worlds have been generally unappealing to me. For example, Second Life is technically fascinating and fairly easy to use, but at the end of a session in Second Life I usually feel like I’ve just done something fairly pointless.

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Perhaps it is just because I'm old...well, old-ish...but most computer games have never really appealed to me much. It doesn't matter whether it's Tetris or BioShock, they mostly seem overly complex in comparison to the amount of "fun" they deliver, require the reaction time of a cheetah if you are to be successful, demand that you remember a load of otherwise useless information or develop unnatural motor skills, and they always leave me with the feeling that I'm just wasting time.

(To be honest the one game playing exception for me has been the Star Wars-derived “Pod Racer” game which I found incredibly entertaining despite the fact I’m no good at it at all.)

Anyway, these reasons may explain why most virtual worlds have been generally unappealing to me. For example, Second Life is technically fascinating and fairly easy to use, but at the end of a session in Second Life I usually feel like I’ve just done something fairly pointless.

I have, however, just found a virtual world that is actually so easy to use and potentially valuable enough that I might actually use it. The virtual world is Weblin, a free services published by Zweitgeist GmbH.

Weblin is a somewhat different concept to services such as Second Life or Small Worlds that I recently discussed. The biggest difference is that rather than having its own, special environment, the Weblin virtual world overlays the current page loaded into your Web browser.

You can either run the Weblin “Light” version from the Weblin home page or you can download and use the full Weblin application. The former works on any OS while the latter is only for Windows - both work with IE and Firefox. A Mac version of the application is due at year-end.

Your avatar (which you can chose from a library or build your own) appears on top of the browser status bar along with the avatars of other Weblin users browsing the same page.

You can conduct conversations publicly or privately with other users, have your avatar execute behaviors (wave, dance, etc.), and move your avatar horizontally to a new location. You can also give virtual gifts to other users, which you pay for with Weblin’s virtual money. You are given the money for free by Weblin and your funds are topped up as you use the service.

So where do Weblin users hang out? You’ll find lots of them on Google - the company told me that Google is rather like the subway for Weblin users; they are passing through and don’t chat much - while other sites gather more focused, chatty audiences. Apparently there’s a European pet-oriented Web site that is a major destination for many European Weblin users, and you’ll find throngs of Weblin avatars hanging out at popular sites such as Microsoft and AOL.

So far some 1 million users have signed up. Originally the developers thought that the typical user would be in the 15 to 25 age range, but analysis of which Web sites users visit indicates that the average age may be significantly greater.

An interesting aspect of the service is that the developers intentionally haven’t included instrumentation to provide detailed monitoring of user behavior. There are two reasons for this: First, the developers are fanatical about privacy and believe that such monitoring is basically wrong and, second, German and European Union privacy laws are much more restrictive than U.S. laws.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.