Second Earth / WWW2B

It's coming soon - the 2nd Earth phase of the world wide web. If you use the internet, you're somewhat familiar with online multiuser environments. If you play a game like World of Warcraft or Second Life, then you've had a glimpse of things to come. The prediction (of people like Wade Roush of Technology Review) is that there will be a world wide simulated environment, a metaverse a little like the one described in Neal Stephenson's 1992 novel Snow Crash. Of course, we've heard these "everything will change" predictions before. It's possible that a backlash over privacy concerns (or intellectual property, or access and usability) could send us spinning in yet another direction. What do you think?

Second Earth -Wade Roush, Technology Review:

The World Wide Web will soon be absorbed into the World Wide Sim: an environment combining elements of Second Life and Google Earth.... This, then, is how the Metaverse will take shape: through the imaginations of the programmers, merchants, artists, activists, and networkers who are already moving there. If these part-time émigrés from reality want embellishments like running water or six sunsets a day, they'll code their universes that way. The rest of us may smile at their whimsy--but we will take up, and come to depend upon, the serious tools that underlie their play. And if the world we create together is less lonely and less unpredictable than the one we have now, we'll have made a good start.

http://people.uis.edu/rschr1/2007/07/second-earth-wade-roush-technology.html