The Electric Sheep company announced yesterday a new in-house product called WebFlock, which sounds like a nice framework to create web based virtual environments. ESC describes their product as following:

WebFlock is an application for private-labeled, Web-based virtual experiences. It provides a visually immersive environment for social interaction, media consumption and game play.

At its core, the tool lets the Sheep create entirely white-label, Flash-based, download-free (past the Flash plug-in) environments for socializing, casual games, and media consumption

And I totally agree with Verbecks (CEO of ESC) in his opinion, that a lot of clients already see the benefit of avatar based, virtual environments, but that ”There just was not a platform where you could easily create that and get a large adoption very quickly from the user base.”

Of course there are a lot of platforms already, who are operating in the web-based area. But all of them had so far at least one of two disadvantages:

1. They see themselves as a closed community, which wants to get as much users a possible, without thinking of white-labeling their product.
2. They still rely on a plugin technology, which means a software download (even if it’s very small) and therefore means a barrier, which will cost - everybody who will use their technology - users.

Well - of course a lot of people (especially Second Life enthusiasts) will now stand up and say, that WebFlock is pretty limited and not comparable to other solutions on the market.

And of course: it’s not - but as I have pointed out already in this post, for a lot of meaningful usage scenarios for corporations you don’t need a massive immersive, flexible, “all-rounder” virtual world like Second Life.

Quite a lot of benefits from the perspective of a corporation and also from the perspective of a casual user, are already coverable with technologies and platforms, which are much less complex in many different ways. As it looks like for me, ESC decided to use the technology which will reach the greatest audience - Flash - and implemented as many aspects of a social virtual avatar based environment as possible.

So as you might notice I am pretty enthusiastic and optimistic about the announcement of WebFlock, because from all what I have experienced in the last two years, thats exactly the piece which was missing, to get again a lot of different and interesting projects running in the realm of virtual worlds.

Let’s hope that third parties will be able to license that product. In the interview on which this post is based, something like this is already mentioned:

And, eventually, Verbeck says, the final step is to let others host the service under a licensing model.

Well - nice Looking forward to learn more about WebFlock!