Sheep Produce Sleek Sophisticated Out of the Box WebFlock

With SHOWTIME’s The L Word® signing up as a first customer, The Electric Sheep Company today announced WebFlock™, a new private-label virtual world application for individual clients wanting "improved online social interaction, media consumption and multi-player casual game-play" for their followers.

The Sheep created and has staffed the wildly popular "L Word in Second Life" online space since 2007 and although the virtual experience won rave reviews and brought significant fan participation there remained the inherent Second Life - ahem - challenges.

Second Life can be a hard platform to master for the un-geek crowd and that was a barrier to entry that the Sheep thought they could solve with WebFlock. Apparently Showtime shared the faith they can do so with this web-based application that runs on Flash which is already installed on 98% of the world’s Web browsers.

As the Sheep put it "Mainstream users are reluctant to download software, whether desktop applications or custom browser plug-ins." Thus basing WebFlock on Flash - something already resident on most computers - makes for smooth of entry, at least in theory.

The look of the WebFlock application is sleek and sophisticated and includes chat filtering and muting to screen out the rabble. Avatars and 3D spaces can be unique to each client as can       interactivity such as casual games.

In short, WebFlock is an option for companies wanting a private branding for their customer base and afraid of the geek factor and sometimes misunderstanding press that Second Life brings.

Their timing might be good or bad, coming on the heels of the announcement of a new virtual world called Lively, created by Google and which has opened to a less than warm welcome by some, and optimism by others. Google's first boos came from Mac and Linux users whose systems do not run Lively, period.

In my book Lively is cartoonish and juvenile in contrast with the very adult sophistication of WebFlock, but to compare them head to head is like comparing apples and oranges and not fair to either.

Look for both to get more of my attention however as I continue to contend that the future of the 3-d web will play a big part in all our connectivity in the future.