3pointD.com

Business 2.0’s Om Malik dives into Hive7, a virtual world built in Ajax, over at the GigaOm blog. Malik believes that 3D virtual worlds like Second Life “will give way to a more Web-based virtual world,” and sees a strong contender in Hive7. I haven’t delved in far enough to give an opinion yet, but I’m interested to hear what other people think. One interesting thing to note about Hive7: the code is apparently completely open, so you can take the thing and make of it what you want. That’s exciting.

Philip Rosedale, founder and CEO of Linden Lab, which runs Second Life, joined us on SecondCast the other night (where I appear as Walker Spaight, editor of the Second Life Herald) for a long conversation that SecondCast creator Johnny Ming has broken up into two parts. Listen to Part One over at the SecondCast site, and hear Philip pine for the days when he’ll be able to quit his job, since he thinks he’d be able to make more money in SL than at LL. Good stuff on where Philip sees SL going: closer to the World Wide Web than a hermetically sealed fantasyland. That’s a relief, if you ask me.