3D interactivity enhances the social experience of the web. And since the early, entirely text based mutli-user dungeons, people swarm to the find the hottest places to hang out and chat or role play. Social networking sites like Myspace and Youtube offer more and more interactive features to facilitate relationships. Facebook and Flickr allow users to share a "wall" or room, enhanced with their friends commentary. Soon whole virtual economies with multiple currencies emerged offering exciting new opportunities. Some of these online realms host the development of whole new organizations. Others offer new ways to view the web and our social spaces. And many are free and open source. Here are a few I have been investigating.

• 3B - Represents the web like a city with malls and rooms.
• 3dxplorer - 3DXplorer uses Java so no need to install any additional software.
• Amazingworlds - 3D Tourism
• Empire Of Sports - Create Teams and play against real people. 3D Fantasy Teams
• ExitReality - Enter every website as a 3D virtual world
• FootBall SuperStars - Virtual World for football fans by football fans.
• Forterra - Private Virtual Worlds for Education, Business, Military, and fun.
• FreeRealms - Free Online Fantasy like Worlds of Warcraft
• GaiaOnline - Around 100,000 online at any one time.
• Meez - NO SWAG LEECHES ALLOWED!!!
• Metaplace - It's free with no download!
• Minsh - An underwater world to visualize Twitter. Just give them your username and password! Go Phish!!
• Moondus - 3D multi avatar platform from Virtual Italian Parks.
• Multiverse - Network of interactive entertainment, including virtual worlds. Mutliverse Places is in beta.
• Myrl - Social gateway for virtual worlds that allows you to share your virtual life on the web. Link up worlds from:
  • Activeworlds - Explore over 1000 unique virtual worlds
  • Entropia - Develop your avatar on the untamed planet of Calypso.
  • Habbo - A Zelda like roomshare
  • Hipihi - 3D world created, inhabited and owned by its residents with a complex social structure and a fully functioning economy.
  • IMVU - Avatars chat in animated 3D scenes.
  • Kaneva - One of the most mature roomshare sites.
  • Lively - Network of avatars and virtual rooms created and decorated by its users. Google launched Lively as an experiment in providing people with more ways to express themselves on the Web. Users created thousands of cafes, bars, discos, tropical islands, treehouses, space stations, galleries, bedrooms and more. Users shared their rooms with people from all over the real world, meeting and chatting with each other via their customized avatars. The experiment ended December 31, 2008. Keep your eye out.
  • Openlife - Created by over 50,000 registered users in the Openlife Beta Virtual World.
  • Second Life - Free 3D virtual world where users can socialize, connect and create using voice and text chat. If you want to set up your own world, you don't have to pay.
  • SmallWorlds - Cartoonish worlds where you share experiences like playing games, watching YouTube videos, listening to your favourite band, browsing through photo galleries.
  • Smeet - I think most of the hot avatars are bots.
  • There - Virtual World and Economy
  • Twinity - Digital Berlin. Planning other replicas of famous cities.
  • Vivaty - AIM or Facebook and more.
  • Vizwoz - Invite your friends and earn more Vizdollars to make your avatar look cool, send your friend gifts and customise your MyPlace room.
  • VMTV - Don't visit the Pepsi Lounge!
  • Vside - A GTA style Roomshare
  • WeeWorld - Facebook Ap type Roomshare
  • and more...
• Neopets - Virtual pet community with over 250 million pets.
• Opensimulator - Simulate anything - even whole worlds.
• ProtoSphere - Secure, private virtual world environments. Not free.
• Qwaq - Provides 3-D virtual collaboration solutions such as workspaces for program management, offices, operations centers or anything else; for a price. Based on Squeak Smalltalk's Croquet. A Free implimentation, Cobalt, offers full blown metaverse browser and construction toolkit for accessing, creating, and publishing hyperlinked multi-user virtual worlds and has already been used on projects like Edusim
• RealXtend - Open source platform for interconnected virtual worlds
• RocketOn - Complete platform for running virtual worlds on any website.
• SceneCaster - Create a 3D virtual space from scratch or generate it from your Facebook account.
• Sirikata - BSD licensed open source platform for games and virtual worlds as well as libraries and protocols which can be used in deploying and hosting these virtual worlds.
• Solipsis - Peer to peer network of virtual worlds discontinued, but split off into Twinverse
• Splume - Japanese site featuring widget so you can put your 3D world into your blog or website.
• Spore - Create worlds and creatures that evolve.
• Stardoll - Virtual paper doll social network with over 10 million users.
• Unity3D - Worlds and tools to make your own. Unity2.5 now ships with Mac and Windows
• VastPark - No registration required.
• The Forbidden City - Not to be confused with the Virtual Tour through the actual Forbidden City.
• Virtual Heroes - Interactive learning environment for serious games.
• Webkinz - Full Virtual world with econony - For Kids
• Weblin - 3D chat tool with more than 2 million users!
• Yoowalk - 45,000 members, very weird!!
• Zon - Zon is an unique interactive massively multiplayer online role playing game for learning Mandarin Chinese.

I am expanding this list as we speak, but I already have encountered contingents of infowarriors scattered throughout the metaverse. And the tools to unite become increasingly available and easy to use. I am interested in ideas for how to get the word out. Like many of the Fortune 500, we can leverage this technology for education, organization, and fun. Let me know if you have any information about people actively waking people up in these or other online virtual communities. Here is a good collection of the military's own sources on the matter. http://www.au.af.mil/...