Sony's SAPARi / Community Place (1994), ActiveWorlds.com (1995), There.com (1998), Habbo Hotel (2000), myCoke (2002), Google Lively (2008), PlayStation Home (2008)
It was such a tired cliché by then that even Homestarrunner was making fun of it in 2007 [0].
Go look back at some of the early VRML hype from the mid 90s, it's like watching history replay itself. Most of it is before the era of the Wayback Machine, but there's a few good articles out there still [1] [2]. I can't even find any news writeups of SGI WebSpace, just screenshots, despite it being the VRML plugin for Netscape back then.
[0] https://youtu.be/j8dpa7QGZLE?t=147 [1] https://www.jch.com/jch/vrml/timeline.html [2] https://community-place.neocities.org/
You know what? the internet was better when it topped out at 56k for mortals.
And remember webrings and Internet Link Exchange?
I'd also say that MySpace and Tumblr carried that vision forward.
It's ironic that Facebook won, with its bland conformity, and now they think they're going to bring us the metaverse.
What's worrying is...what if FB manages to create a metaverse that thrives on the same toxicity that FB itself does. And through the Oculus makes the tech cheap and portable enough to get a critical mass of people involved in it.
The general consensus seems to be (and at this point I wholeheartedly agree) FB attempting to build a meta world is hysterical considering their seeming complete inability (with some unwillingness sprinkled in) to address trolls/astroturfing /misinformation on their flagship site was a significant driver of many people ceasing to use the site.
If they screw up something like a vanilla social network, they have no shot at running an entire second life derivative. At least one where anyone other than NFT sneakerhead type marketing victims will willingly spend their valuable free time.
Nowadays Minecraft and Roblox seem to fill similar niches.
That many attempts failed doesn't mean all attempts will fail. You may not know this, but there were other social networks before Facebook. There was Orkut and MySpace, for example, both disappeared. Yet Facebook now is a billion dollar company.
VRML appeared at a time when people were still using dial-up modems. Things change - eventually technology may be good enough for people to adopt VR on a larger scale.
Yet the social network as a concept that moved from one monopoly to another is a fad that is dieing. It certainly seems likely companies that have gotten their start from VR will succeed in collecting a lot of money and possibly diversifying successfully, but will VR end up being more useful than a FB style social site?
The basic problem with VR for me is that second life showed some potential that isn't going to happen because it is socially positive and a lot of negatives that make me want to kill VR as a medium before I have to deal with FB owning real estate in it.
FB has basically created the bifurcation that will limit the future of all new mediums. Half your friends will never use anything they participate in making the concept of social X a disaster for any X.
Nobody would be happier than me if a decentralized alternative to social networks like Facebook could be established.
I am not really seeing it as a given, though - the big companies usually offer more convenience and the masses fall for it. And for content creators it makes more sense to go to where the masses are. I have looked into the Fediverse but it seems there is hardly anything there.
I don't know if VR will replace classic web sites like Facebook. An issue in SL, for me at least, was that it was too difficult to create a good looking avatar. In Facebook you don't have to bother with web design. Not sure how to translate that to VR - everybody having a standard living hexagon for representation probably won't work.