I’ve been taking a little time to look around Small Worlds and it’s quite a unique addition to the spectrum of virtual worlds out there.

• It’s Flash, and hence immediately multi-platform
• It understands that 3D is by no means a necessity and for most people is actually an unwelcome complication
• It’s tidy. They obviously have some great communication designers working for them
• It’s a layer over existing applications linking into YouTube, Flickr etc and enhancing an experience that people are already familiar with. They’re not trying to reinvent the wheel!
• It works. Nuff said for anyone who’s had the pleasure of attempting navigation of most other virtual worlds
• Their avatar creation system is easy and fun. The right balance between usability and freedom
• The commercialization model isn’t in your face.
• Being able to create avatars for your friends and mail it to them? Brilliant!
• Adorable little pets

• Let people see what it looks like inside right from the front page
• Less text in the tutorial screens, I wanna play not read
• A shade more vertical space to move around would be nice
• Walking around spaces needs a little tweaking
• Trying to click on the close button of a moving dialog box is somewhat tricky

Compared to Google’s recently released Lively, this is slick, fast, and most importantly, functional. I’ve got to say I was terribly unimpressed by Lively, and hope that they’re planning refining it a lot more. My money is on Lively going down a similar route to Google Video, where their top tier entry into the virtual world space comes by way of acquisition as opposed to internal development.

The long term plan for Small Worlds iis to expand the world and empower third parties to add content in a consistent and efficient manner. This could be a great platform for the delivery of Meaningful Play, so we’ll be keeping an extra special eye on it.