Tech Center Current

It looks like Google is somehow involved in developing an online virtual world program called My World that will be available to Arizona State University students starting next month, and it’s likely to expand from there. There aren’t many details yet, but the source (Google Blogoscoped) is usually reliable. TechCrunch also has the story.

It has been suggested that this service may provide the same sorts of social functions provided in Second Life. Second Life is a 3D virtual world that allows users to customize their appearance; purchase virtual land and products; construct objects, devices, and even creatures from raw materials and a simple programming language; run virtual businesses; and socialize with other users. There isn’t enough information yet to suggest that My World will allow you this level of freedom, but it is clearly designed to allow users to interact with each other in some sort of virtual world.

There is some speculation that Google will use some of the technology behind Google Earth in this new product, although this is purely speculation and not based on any statements made by Google. It isn’t yet confirmed whether the My World environment will be 2D, 3D, or “2.5D“.

Google has recently begun a big push into social networking:

• Google announced at a secret meeting (some attendants anonymously spilled the beans to news sources) that they will launch a new service on November 5 that will rival the popular social networking site Facebook by competing in the openness of their respective frameworks. Facebook has been criticized for employing the Microsoft strategy of “let everything in, let nothing out” which has been a turn-off for many users. Google’s upcoming rival may or may not be directly related to My World.

• Recently, Google quietly launched a beta service called My Shared Stuff that looks to rival popular social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us (which Yahoo bought out a while ago) and Ma.gnolia.com. My Shared Stuff isn’t yet advertised anywhere on the Google site and seems to have a lot of rough edges, so its public release might have been unintentional.

• Google has been working with Carnegie Mellon University on a project called Socialstream which aims to “create a system for users to seamlessly share, view, and respond to many types of social content across multiple networks.”

• Google developed the orkut social networking site that is extremely popular in Brazil (at one point, studies showed that orkut was the #1 most visited website among Brazilian Internet users). It’s available worldwide, but most mainstream users of social networking sites in the United States have primarily used MySpace and are starting to move to Facebook.

• Google also has other products like Blogger, YouTube, Google Talk, Google Docs, and Google Groups which have a strong emphasis on social networking.

According to the beta site (which is not yet fully open even to ASU students), the product will officially launch later this year, presumably to everyone.