The Periodic Table of the Metaverse
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Remember when we were in high school in India, China, Russia, US or elsewhere? We sat in a classroom with the Periodic Table on the wall. Chemists will tell you that it is the foundation of their field. It guides us in chemistry. I found a similar guide to the Metaverse.
Today’s Metaverse is very small. Each site wants to keep you there. This echoes the tactics in the dot com years by such sites as AOL and Yahoo. Both built massive portals for this reason. But the first Web (1995–99) was about you being able to click a link and go anywhere on the Web. Later developments in the Web built this out. Now we are in Web 3, whatever that is. I argue that Web 3 shares the property of being able to go to many sites. This is axiomatic. Our very use of “Web” comes from the spider’s web. The sticky threads in that web became the hyperlinks of the Web, from 1989 to the present.
Web 3 has avatars that move around. This gives us the first property of Web 3. Avatars can go to different sites.
Avatars take human form. Thus avatar-avatar interactions are a major way to engage users.
Irony. We went from Web 1.0 with its browsers in full circle to avatars meeting each other, just like we do in real life. And in real life, meeting someone in person is often considered the most important thing, for business or socializing. For this, being able to shake hands, dance etc are common. This uses real life as a metaphor to guide us to possible interactions.
We get these properties:
1] Avatars visit different sites.
2] Avatar-avatar interactions better engage users.
3] Avatars touch each other.
It is early days. The Web was born in 1989 by Berners-Lee and we were always able to visit different websites, thanks for webpages written in HTML. But for Web 3, we have trouble with Property 1. Firms are grappling with revving hardware, simply to improve the UX for you with an avatar made for only 1 site (their site). They might be using this as a possible reason to put off the ability for your avatar to go to different sites.
Property 3 runs into Facebook’s safety shield. (Also made by other firms with sites.) This was to protect female avatars from being molested by…
