3pointD.com

With the announcement the other day that Google was making SketchUp available for free also came news of 3D Warehouse, Google’s free repository for SketchUp models that can be imported into Google Earth. Now, Stefan Geens at Ogle Earth posts a very perceptive essay about some of the problems with Google’s not-quite-free and not-quite-open model.

As Geens points out, Google more or less compels the use of certain kinds of metadata by including in its search results only the sites that use it.

Google wasn’t around when HTML took off around 1993, so it had to come by later to devise algorithms that find the gems in this inchoate mass of information. But Google is around today, as whole new kinds of content gain currency — map layers, 3D objects, video — and it is trying to enforce a new semantic order by offering to host the content in return for some user-generated metatagging, which Google can use for more refined ads ahem search results.

Not necessarily a problem. Of more concern, however, is Geens’s next paragraph:

Nowhere is this compact between content contributor and Google more evident than when you try to “Share with Google Earth Community” from within Google Earth. Google will reject your contribution outright if you have not made sufficient effort to describe it.

That’s not so good, and seems to break with the open-armed approach Google usually takes. If I want to contribute something that’s tagged oddly, I should be able to. Anything else is a brake on creativity. Not a large one, but a brake nonetheless.

More importantly, Geens questions the wisdom of having “the majority of a content type . . . to be found on one proprietary database, with preferential links to an endorsed content browser (e.g. base layers in Google Earth),” and asks, “how does that affect ease of access for other players, including content creators and other search engines? And if Microsoft is going to create a competing virtual Earth, with its own proprietary content capture system generating ad revenue, aren’t we heading down the road to 3D web Balkanization? And is that really a good idea?”

Geens winds up with a thought that should make you want to read his piece, if you haven’t already: “The HTML browser wars were not pretty. I wouldn’t want to repeat them in 3D.”