There are far too many applications in the private beta phase are worth to be profiled in this blog, including this one, i.e. SmallWorlds. I’ll briefly explain its specific features, but I think you’ll be realized the full features of SmallWorlds when it opens its public access in June 2 next month.

SmallWorlds was developed by an Adobe partner based in New Zealand called Outsmart. They have several projects in their labs, and all of them are focus efforts on creating Flash or Flex related applications that can be leveraged in a Web-based technology. SmallWorlds considered as a grand vision for Outsmart, carried a motto which is “build your own world.” Since its unveiling, SmallWorlds has been full of surprise, including the praise of a Rich Internet Application Evangelist from Adobe, in an article entitled, “Smallworld: The coolest Flex application I’ve ever seen.”

Since SmallWorlds venture into the field of 3-D, it is inevitably be compared with another strong player Second Life or HiPiHi. Although there are no mature standards to determine what’s a 3-D player should act or behave in, but SmallWorlds has emerged itself as a strong contender in this field, particularly in view of its differentiation strategy, in terms of usefulness, and in the form of convenient.

1) SmallWorlds is available in any Web browser. In other word, an user will not need to download and install a SmallWorlds software to run it.

2) With a distinct URL address of a 3-D space, you can instantly share your discovery on SmallWorlds with your friends.

3) You can customize the avatar you created, and this should be critical for a 3-D lover.

4) You should expect the 3-D virtual space to evolve rapidly as the interaction of 3-D users evolve, and SmallWorlds set to capitalize on this direction. As SmallWorlds said, “Users can share experiences like playing games, watching YouTube videos, listening to their favorite band, browsing through photo galleries, and a whole lot more.”

5) The availability of full 3-D chat environment. A standard 2D Flex User Interface components projected into a 3D world, as mentioned in a 2007 post.

6) SmallWorlds is going to open its platform for the third-part application developers. This approach is proven popular, as more casual games are being rendered in this 3-D platform.

To know more about SmallWorlds, check out their latest post entitled, “A virtual world for the masses.” Stay tuned.

Second Life is a hot thing among the 3-D Internet users, but in China, there is another great startup that showed to the world that there’s another virtual world beside Second Life, i.e. HiPiHi. Frankly, I’m not logged-into it yet, my friend told me it’s not easy to sign-up successfully during the first day it offered the public access. In particular, it attracted huge traffic in the first day of their officially launched on the Web. According to HiPiHi (in Mandarin), they’re the creator of China’s first 3-D virtual world, and after they took a considerable amount of private beta, approx. one year, they’ve decided to launched their 3-D virtual environment on April 18th this month.

At present, they’ve 43 thousand users, most notably change for this public launch is the redesign of their username ID system. A new ID support numerical symbols, from 6 to 16 digits, as well as the Chinese character, minimum digit is 3. In other word, as a Chinese resides in South-East countries, I can sign-up by using my real Chinese name. In order to attract more potential users turn to this HiPiHi for experiment, they’ve a new interface design, with most of images are at dark grey color. For the non-Chinese users, a lot of 3-D images have been created to supplement the Chinese words, so that they’ll get to know more deeper about what happening during their experiment with HiPiHi. Of course, an user will get the overall look and feel of this HiPiHi as she explore this China’s first 3-D virtual world. Until today, HiPiHi community has been created 12084 homes, 572476 creations, and 510 groups, at the time of my writing.

Additionally, an user is entitled to search for the un-sold land to build her own house there. In near future, I expect users can also create and sell items online to the other HiPiHi users, and eventually make some profit in that environment, similarly to Second Life, where an user can earn Linden dollars and convert them to real money.

3-D virtual world is nothing new to the social networking arena, as HiPiHi users can get so much fun to be in that environment. An existing HiPiHi user called blackhumor is planned to get his darling to have a virtual marriage ceremony on HiPiHi. Understandably, users can take their HiPiHi social networking activities to the next level, in spite of all these activities will likely push HiPiHi to the edge, but when consider the partnership of HiPiHi and IBM, both agreed to continually improve HiPiHi’s platform, many beautiful things can happen.

Update: Below is the picture of HiPiHi’s virtual environment, with two of the motional avatars standing on the ground. While playing around with the avatar created with my friend, I hardly find members or houses on HiPiHi. A huge number of the users seemed to be not familiar on how to manipulate the avatars, in viewed of the avatars are jumping from one location to another.

Below is another picture on how a member interact with each other through the instant messaging service. An user can choose to communicate with the other by typing English or Simplified Chinese. A chat dialog box appeared on the left bottom side will include all of the messages.