What is important - in my opinion - is to understand Web 2.0 as a business opportunity and what it is doing for games. Kaneva is taking one approach, and using “aspects of Web 2.0″ in games.

Kaneva is a new social network that extends the concept of MySpace into a virtual world. Although you’ve been able to sign up for a 2D profile on Kaneva they recently opened the doors to their 3D world. The idea is that users can create personal profile pages in the 2D space, like MySpace, but also carry out the same personalization to their virtual world apartments.

The social networking site is chock full of all of MySpace’s main features: friends, photos, videos, messages, groups, and personal blogs. Kaneva also gives you control over what your home site and profile look like, using an AJAX editor to drop modules into the page. If you really feel like replicating your MySpace’s horrid layout, you can also dress your profile in straight CSS.
Unlike MySpace, Kaneva also includes a voting system, called “raves”, to mark the best profiles, groups, photos, and videos.

I’d love to see the interactive picture frames and televisions in Kaneva be able to pull content directly from Flickr or YouTube. It would be also fun to see that content become clickable, so that you could see a photo on an apartment wall and click through to the Web page where it’s taken from. Neither of those things is possible at the moment, but Kaneva hinted to me that something like this might be coming.

written by Florin C.