social networks and virtual worlds converge

To read the ful article on virtual worlds news just click the pic.

One of the Top Ten social Networks, Hi5 acquired a company named Pixverse a few month ago. Pixverse provides a 2D chat widget with enabled photo-sharing and video-sharing. Charles Ying, one of the PixVerse founders and now a software architect for Hi5 gives an outlook on the further development of Hi5´s social network Chat: "The engine, the client, is capable of rendering a lot richer experiences, in 2D and 3D, but that's not publicly available now." He explained furtheron, that more features of traditional virtual worlds, like avatars and games might appear in PixChat.
Like other social networks developing their communication features such as instant messenger applicacions, Hi5 seems to think at least one step ahead. Ying expects social networks and virtual worlds converge.

2008 METAVERSE TOUR- a video about virtual worlds

Gary Hayes made a cool Video, "2008 METAVERSE TOUR - THE SOCIAL VIRTUAL WORLD'S A STAGE". Weblin is one of the virtual worlds mentioned in his video, cool. I was really impressed by the huge number of virtual worlds already existing.
And I liked the quotes between the video snippets, I didn't know that even Shakespaere, Henry Miller and Thoreau thought about virtual worlds!
You can see a lots of different avatars, from 2D to 3D in various steps, pixelworlds and full 3D environments. Great film, thanks Gary.
via marmel