3pointD.com

No April Fool’s joke this: 3pointD turned one year old today! It was in the early hours (early minutes, actually) of April 1, 2006, that I posted my first Hello, World! here. Something like 1,400 posts later (can that be? WordPress must be over-counting) and our mission remains the same: “At its most fundamental level, it’s about connecting people in new ways, and about giving them the tools to get more out of not just the Web but out of the real world around them.”

That’s still true, but in the year since then, the 3pointD space (aka the metaverse) has begun to resolve itself a bit — which is perhaps not surprising, since the word didn’t actually mean anything a year ago. What I’ve been trying to describe over the last year is the general direction of the future of connectivity. I still feel, as I wrote last March on my old blog, Walkerings, that “Web 2.0 is over like a hipster neighborhood when The Gap moves in,” and that there’s a new neighborhood to be colonized. That’s of course an overstatement for effect, but I don’t think it’s off the mark. Over the next several (many?) years, the most exciting developments in technology are going to be those that leverage our ever-increasing digital access to places both real and virtual to develop better connections between people in various ways.

The question is, What’s that going to look like? I hate making predictions, but as my birthday present to the blog and its readers, I’ve just spent the evening going out on a limb. You can read the details below or you can jump directly to a brief, fun scenario at the end of the post. Enjoy. (more…)

The Second Life Drupal Group has an interesting piece of news: a Drupal framework is apparently in development that would allow Drupal modules to interact with objects in the virtual world of Second Life. There’s no code on the project page at the moment, but it’s coming “Real Soon Now,” according to a comment made today by the developer (assuming it’s not an April Fool’s joke, which I don’t believe it to be). 2bits, a Drupal consulting and development company, initially announced the “release” of the framework about a month ago, but that announcement seems to have been premature. If it is, in fact, in development, it will be interesting to see what users make of it, and it could be a nice marriage of Drupal’s open-source content management system with Second Life’s semi-open-source platform. Another small step toward integrating virtual worlds with the wider Web?