ENLIGHTEN3D

By Joshua Koopferstock

By turning the web into a 3D environment, Yoowalk.com attempts to make surfing the web a community activity.  Using Flash3D, Yoowalk presents the web as a sort of virtual shopping mall, with each site being a virtual store.

When you go to yoowalk.com,  you are immediately dropped into a virtual world of the internet.  You can choose a geographic region to visit, and then walk around through different areas by subject (news, music, shopping, etc.).  As you walk along, you will see the avatars of others who are walking through the same places that you are.

If going to the shopping mall can be an activity to do with friends, why not websurfing?  The idea of social surfing isn’t a new one.  Another application called Me.dium already acts as a kind of buddy list for your browser.  However, I have yet to see another site bringing together a 3D environment and community surfing the way that Yoowalk has.

So will it work?  At first glance, it looks like the concept needs significant refinement before it can become a mainstream way to browse the web.  For one, when you actually enter a site/building, the way the site appears is completely unfamiliar and confusing.

This is Google?

I am personally a big advocate of keeping things familiar; Yoowalk is forcing people to learn a new way to create and see a web page, and I think this is too big of a leap for the company to be taking now.  It would be enough for them to create a way to browse through the web, but then entering the sites should bring up the familiar 2D website.

Furthermore, if the site does get larger, they are going to have millions or billions of websites, which is one awfully big shopping mall.  Effectively organize something like that must be a huge question mark for them.  The concept needs to get much more focused than it is right now since surfing the web is such a varied activity, even for one individual at different times of the day.  Yoowalk should look to emulate the success of other fun-browsing or community-browsing applications: something like StumbleUpon3D could be an interesting approach without having to teach everyone how to surf the web all over again.

I’m always excited and happy to discover new 3D-based apps on the web, but Yoowalk, like too many others, seems to not be placing enough focus on the specific added value (and the time-costs related to gaining this value) that they are providing to their users through their service.  Then again, this is just their beta phase, so I won’t be making a final judgement on them just yet.