Google Virtual World?
MarketingVox is circulating a rumor that Google is working on a virtual world, in the SecondLife vein. I definitely have my doubts. The creation of a destination of this sort seems to go against the Google mindset. That said, they clearly saw value in YouTube, as well as Picasa, and a number of other applications that seem to take them further away from their "organize the world's information" mantra.
What certainly would seem likely would be an interest in indexing Second Life (as well as World of Warcraft and any other virtual worlds). Clearly, there's a lot of new data that is either emerging there, or at least being housed there. In fact, I've heard Linden Lab's business model as simply offering server space to content creators. Should that content also be in Google's index? Assumedly so, especially as more commercial content is created there.
So, how would an island appear in the Google index? How would the crawler index it in the first place? These are the questions that I would imagine Google to be interested in. In fact, if they put out their own virtual world before they solved this (more interesting) problem, I think I'd be a little let down.
What certainly would seem likely would be an interest in indexing Second Life (as well as World of Warcraft and any other virtual worlds). Clearly, there's a lot of new data that is either emerging there, or at least being housed there. In fact, I've heard Linden Lab's business model as simply offering server space to content creators. Should that content also be in Google's index? Assumedly so, especially as more commercial content is created there.
So, how would an island appear in the Google index? How would the crawler index it in the first place? These are the questions that I would imagine Google to be interested in. In fact, if they put out their own virtual world before they solved this (more interesting) problem, I think I'd be a little let down.
posted by Gary Stein at 11:18 AM
1 Comments:
The thing that makes me think there might be credence to the rumours is that Google own Sketchup, and have made it possible to put Sketchup designs layered onto Google Earth. So, effectively, they've already set up a virtual world, just without avatars. I wonder if perhaps Google's 'venture' into SecondLife could be akin to bringing GoogleEarth to SecondLife - thus solving the avatar problem and leveraging assets they've already got.
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