I’ve been taking a little time to look around Small Worlds and it’s quite a unique addition to the spectrum of virtual worlds out there.

• It’s Flash, and hence immediately multi-platform
• It understands that 3D is by no means a necessity and for most people is actually an unwelcome complication
• It’s tidy. They obviously have some great communication designers working for them
• It’s a layer over existing applications linking into YouTube, Flickr etc and enhancing an experience that people are already familiar with. They’re not trying to reinvent the wheel!
• It works. Nuff said for anyone who’s had the pleasure of attempting navigation of most other virtual worlds
• Their avatar creation system is easy and fun. The right balance between usability and freedom
• The commercialization model isn’t in your face.
• Being able to create avatars for your friends and mail it to them? Brilliant!
• Adorable little pets

• Let people see what it looks like inside right from the front page
• Less text in the tutorial screens, I wanna play not read
• A shade more vertical space to move around would be nice
• Walking around spaces needs a little tweaking
• Trying to click on the close button of a moving dialog box is somewhat tricky

Compared to Google’s recently released Lively, this is slick, fast, and most importantly, functional. I’ve got to say I was terribly unimpressed by Lively, and hope that they’re planning refining it a lot more. My money is on Lively going down a similar route to Google Video, where their top tier entry into the virtual world space comes by way of acquisition as opposed to internal development.

The long term plan for Small Worlds iis to expand the world and empower third parties to add content in a consistent and efficient manner. This could be a great platform for the delivery of Meaningful Play, so we’ll be keeping an extra special eye on it.

Luke from Kotaku hits the nail on the head:
“It all sounds great in theory, but as the clip above shows, it’s going to take a particular breed of person/fanboy to be bothered running around a virtual space (complete with eerily disembodied David Reeves talking head) just to see a clip when they’re only a few mouse-clicks away on this here internet.”

I mean seriously, why? What on earth are they actually thinking? I’m personally a huge advocate of the power of virtual worlds but time and again we’re presented with these absurd applications which do little more than get in the way of the content that each world’s inhabitants actually want to consume.

Sony, Linden Labs, and all the other virtual world developers need a big red sign up on their walls that asks one simple question:

“Where’s the added value?”

If the only answer they have concerns an ability to dress up as a penguin and “upgrade” one’s appendages, there needs to be a little more thinking going on.

This bubble is about to burst, but thankfully its just going to result in a good old reality check and a clearing of the air which should pave the way for some more progressive thinking.