FileBlog: Rumor Mill: A Google Virtual World?

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January 29, 2007

Rumor Mill: A Google Virtual World?

Last week when I blogged about the virtual world Second Life, I wrote: "I think Second Life is a little too awkward to use to crack the mainstream, and if you ever log on, it's too hard for a new player to find the good content." Read into that and you can see that the door is wide-open for someone to make a simplistic, user-friendly virtual world. In the same way that World of Warcraft took the pioneering work of Ultima Online and EverQuest and made it easy for players, someone can take the work of pioneers like There and Second Life and go big. If you're an entrepreneur, you probably smell money.

That's probably why this rumor about Google developing a virtual world keeps popping up, much like a zombie from Dead Rising. The noise first started with This Business 2.0 Column. Business 2.0 was just connecting the dots: Google already has Google Earth, a phenomenal toy for cruising around the planet via satellite photos and data. In a brilliant Web 2.0 flavored move, Google then released SketchUp, a simple 3D modeling tool, for free. Users can use SketchUp to create 3D models that they can then place on the Google Earth map, thus populating it with landmarks. Business 2.0 surmised that Google isn't far from creating a metaverse, an idea that persisted even though Google itself isn't saying anything.

The rumor mill fired up again last week as bloggers discovered connections between Google and a group of former There engineers, as well as a Chinese company building digital avatars of people. This, combined with Google's rumored acquisition of an in-game advertising provider, has fueled the rumor.

I admit that Google is in an interesting position to make something happen in the virtual world space. The company has the reach to touch people worldwide, it attracts the best engineers in technology today, and it has a reputation for building solid, easy-to-use, no-frills products that appeal to non-techies. Potential issues that would be serious problems for many companies -- like bandwidth or server farms -- would be trivial to Google. It's conceivable that the company could create a virtual world product that's simple for even casual users, and you have to imagine that a search engine giant like Google would know how to make sure people found the most interesting content within that world.

But this isn't a trivial project. Google Maps is an impressive piece of software, not a real-time shared virtual space. Adding real-time interaction that can support players from all over the world -- that's not something the company can just throw together by combining these separate pieces. So until Google actually formally announces a product, all this discussion is just blanking. ("Blog Wanking.") And yeah, I'm as guilty as anyone else. -Fargo

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