The answer is probably “no” but it is interesting to expore precisely why.
There is a widely held belief that Google and Microsoft could easily turn their geospatial products into mass market virtual worlds containing avatars. While virtual world products such as Twinity have indeed focused on replicating real-life locations, neither of the major players has, as far as I know, stated this as a near-term goal. Moreover, I am reminded of Cory Ondrejka’s observation that the now-defunct Google Lively was room-based to facilitate balancing resource requirements, something that may well prove challenging on the scale of Google Earth. This seems to be borne out in a recent interview with Popcha!, one of the Lively third-party developers, who suggest it was a combination of economic climate, technical scaling issues and uncertain business model that ultimately did for Lively.
Read more at:
via TidalBlog: Did Second Life and OpenSim just eat Google’s lunch?.
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