Go aHead, to the Future!

The virtual world phenomenon of Second Life will transform the Internet within the next few years, and all the web will have to change just as fast to keep up.

Second Life is a 3-D virtual world that provides an online society where users can create and sell things, socialize, and participate in various group activities. There are 5 million registered users and about 200,000 regular users. Second Life offers a first-person view of the virtual world. Users walk around as avatars (virtual bodies), ranging from the lifelike to the quite fanciful.

Net specialist say in the not-so-distant future we'll all be attending virtual meetings instead of flying from office to office. Our avatars will sit around the virtual table with our colleagues' avatars and we'll be able to see how they communicate and interact with each other, just as if we were there in person. Business travel, telecommuting, and even the basic things people expect in day-to-day business will be affected.

As a result of this, the industry will have to get rid of HTTP, a longtime communication protocol that enables Web browsing. It's simply outlived its usefulness a while ago but technologists keep bending it to their will, instead of moving on to something else.

Actually some of the browsers are already heading in this direction as the technology adapts to user-based content. Users are no longer going online just to shop on eBay or scan the news at CNN.com. They're receiving blog feeds, they're writing their own blogs, pushing out their own text, video, and images. YouTube is redefining the way people use the Internet, and browsers need to feed that experience.

The user content-based experience will continue to grow. It will be the primary user experience instead of dedicated company websites. We at aHead understand this. :)