Imagine taking the avatars from a virtual world like Second Life and setting them free on the World Wide Web. That’s my explanation of Weblin (formerly known as Zweitgeist).
So instead of logging in to a virtual world and flying your avatar to a virtual showroom of your favourite car manufacturer where he could inform himself about the newest car models, he could now just go to the manufacturer’s website… I mean, you could go to the website and your avatar would be there, too, like the avatars of other people just visiting this website at the same time. Presumably, you could then do whatever it is that avatars do. Or think about IBM: Instead of meeting somewhere in Second Life, IBM’s teams could meet right on the company’s website, eliminating the need to invest a lot of money in a new virtual presence.* The WWW’s virtual enough already!
If you see it from this perspective, Weblin makes a lot of sense. I might actually install it after having had a closer look at their privacy policy.
*If I just saved your company a lot of money, feel free to send me huge cheque. 😉
Thanks for the link. I’m adding Weblin to my growing collection of similar technologies (gogofrog and 3B.net being other examples).