there are many opportunities for appropriate, targeted advertising: In an experimental promotion for the 20th Century Fox movie Horton Hears a Who, for example, Weblin created custom, automated weblins that chatted with visitors, giving them links to the movie trailer and other pages. The company ran a similar promotion for Adidas. “If you think of it as part of the entertainment, it’s the least annoying advertising imaginable,” says Andresen.
A slightly less conventional revenue stream could come from selling virtual goods (though Weblin would hardly be the first to try this—Facebook, Second Life, World of Warcraft, Boston’s Hangout.net, and many other virtual worlds and social networking communities have all developed virtual economies of varying complexity). Already, Weblin members earn a certain amount of virtual currency every week simply for being active users; they can use this currency to buy special avatars. Starting next month, says Andresen, members will be able to buy extra Weblin currency using real money, and they’ll be able to use it to buy “spells”—for example, the ability to shower another weblin with an animated rain of red roses.
And there may be one more way for Weblin to collect money. According to the company’s surveys, many people who use virtual worlds and immersive games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft would like to take the avatars they’ve built inside those worlds out onto the wider Web. So the company has developed beta software that transform 3-D avatars from virtual worlds into the animated PNG graphics of which weblins are comprised.
So far, the service only works for Second Life avatars. And it’s not clear whether virtual-world citizens, or the companies that run these worlds, would ultimately be the ones paying for the service. “There are so many virtual worlds out there, and they would all benefit from allowing users to take their favorite avatars onto the Web, where they would become ambassadors,” says Andresen.
Weblin’s new general manager for North America, Marc Theermann, is based in Wellesley, MA. Andresen says Weblin wanted to open a U.S. office because “we saw a lot of uptake in the U.S., and we are also taking to a lot of potential partners here. It’s a very important market to us.”
I’ll be watching to see whether weblins catch on more widely. Weblin belongs to a long line of attempts to make the Web browsing experience more social—starting with an annotation tool called Third Voice back in 1999, and continuing all the way to present-day systems like Diigo. None of those systems have caught on widely, and it’s still not clear, to me at least, that browsing the Web and communicating with friends on the same screen is a natural mix. (Plenty of people, of course, surf the Web while chatting away with instant-messaging buddies in a separate window.) But Weblin has come up with a novel and amusing way to mash together the Web, instant messaging, and virtual worlds—and who knows, it may turn out that this is the magic formula for making the Web into a relaxing hangout.
