By DPA
Hamburg : A page at eBay looks like a shop window on a high street with some pretty strange people outside when web users have a free program called Weblin installed.
There’s an astronaut bobbing in apparent zero gravity and an alien with four arms scratching his head. A polar bear can say, in a speech bubble, “Where are you from?”
These tiny screen figures represent flesh-and-blood human beings.
Weblin is intended for web surfers who want to make themselves perceptible through an avatar, a kind of visual alter ego, during their internet explorations.
Zweitgeist, a company in Hamburg, Germany, which contends that users who visit certain websites usually have multiple interests in common, developed the software.
Weblin is part of the new buzz over internet communities, which form in chat rooms and on mailing lists. Just as strangers sometimes strike up conversations in supermarket queues or while waiting at pedestrian crossings, web users often make friends online.
“The internet is a virtual space and what we have done is to switch on the light in there,” said Christine Stumpf, chief executive. She went into partnership with Heiner Wolf in 2005 to form the company.
Both believe there is demand for surfer visibility in the anonymous web space. Even among reserved Germans, one fifth say they have made acquaintances via the internet, a Forsa poll has shown.
Weblin users do not show their true faces but choose from a library of stock faces of people and other creatures. The avatars can text-message one another through speech bubbles, smile, look angry, dance and wave.
What they talk about depends on the forum they are using: there are rooms for dog lovers or news junkies.
As in real life, some users admit they are not really paying attention at all.
To acquire a visible virtual identity, web users have to download and install the free Weblin software.
Whenever the user visits a website somewhere, the program automatically contacts the Weblin server to see if any other Weblin users are there at the same time.
The avatars of the other visitors then appear on the edge of the screen.
Stumpf insists that Weblin does not keep records on which sites its users have been visiting.
To earn revenue to fund all this, Zweitgeist is planning to put advertising banners among the avatars and will also offer a paid, premium service that provides extra features and avatars.
“However I think only be a small minority of users will pay,” said Stumpf, who hopes the service achieves the break-even point in 2009. Until then, Zweitgeist will be busy developing its population of Weblin users.
The company is coy about how many users have signed up so far, saying only that it is a five-digit number and that it is aiming for 100,000 by the end of this year.
Armin Rott, a University of Hamburg professor of media economics, notes that social-networking sites need critical mass and do not become attractive as advertising platforms till at least 100,000 users are on board.
Rott said it was difficult to forecast whether advertisers would want to book space on Weblin.
“Marketing people are always calling for exciting new forms of advertising, but are sometimes scared off by the complicated technical issues involved in actually using them,” he said.
Non-conventional advertising is still at an experimental stage, he says.
A test run with Adidas gives a hint of how Weblin advertising might look. Every 90 minutes an athlete, such as Susan the jogger, shows up among the avatars, wearing gear from you know who, and says “Hi everybody.”
So far there are English, Italian, German, Spanish and Portuguese versions of the Weblin portal and a Japanese version is on the way.