Social Networks have been the buzzing web applications for a while now. There has been a significant shift in the online world towards bringing more services to the individual, and social networks have been the defining application towards this trend. At the same time, the success of online virtual worlds such as Second Life have shown that there are two worlds – one social and one virtual that will have to merge at some point down the information highway.

Avatars are virtual identities that with today’s better bandwidth and more graphics crunching capacities on machines provide a custom identity to the netizen. With the sprucing of more and more virtual services online, there is an increasing need for users to be able to take their avatars across services.

An excerpt from the Technology Review

Efforts to carry avatars from one world to another or out onto the Web are still plagued by the lack of interoperability among virtual worlds and inconsistent standards for graphics. Though more than 20 companies announced last fall their intention to develop standards for virtual worlds, those standards are yet to come. Patrick O’Shaughnessey, vice president of software development for the Electric Sheep Company, which makes content for virtual worlds and works with many different platforms, said at a panel during the conference that the interoperability forum is still “talking about how they want to talk about” standards. In the meantime, companies have gone ahead with their own efforts to connect worlds, supporting standards to whatever degree they now exist (for example, DAZ 3D supports COLLADA and FBX, two popular formats for 3-D images).

The above development is interesting considering that the data portability org seeks to achieve the same for the meta identity of a person, i.e. the profile. As online worlds get more immersive, expect the social worlds and the virtual worlds to meet with profiles, contacts and avatars becoming portable across the Internet.

The success of Second Life has also shown that businesses have a lot to gain from virtual worlds. While the big debate goes on about whether social networks are worth all that they are hyped to be (consider FaceBook’s valuation at $15 billion), virtual worlds have been known to have good and working economies and more promising advertising estate. Mix together a lot of disparate developments in the online space (such as Google’s Street View) and the move towards web platforms and speculation reaches new highs.

Perhaps the future will be about individual developers selling programs (for virtual currency) that perform virtual tasks in a virtual world. No matter how far the speculation goes, expect the tech biggies with the server infrastructure necessary for driving such services to drum up products to this end.

We have already seen how one killer application on the Internet can create massive competitors. Google did it to Microsoft by monetizing search and targeting consumers. Facebook could do the same with a search application that makes it redundant for users to use Google. And the convergence of the social and virtual world could well see the making of the next big web-tech firm.