There.com to add Mac support and Facebook plug-in
The virtual world, There.com, appears ready to reach for some new and broad audiences, announcing Tuesday night that it would finally be offering support for Mac OS X, as well as a new Facebook plug-in and an instant message application …
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2008, virtual worlds were hunting for mainstream audiences beyond their early-adopter PC base, and There.com's answer was two-pronged: finally support Mac OS X so it could stop excluding Apple users, and ride Facebook's exploding social graph via a plug-in rather than waiting for users to find it on its own. The move treats Facebook as a distribution channel for a destination product — an inversion of what came later, when Facebook itself built desktop clients like its standalone Messenger app for macOS and Windows.
First-order effects
- There.com immediately widens its addressable audience to Mac owners who previously had no native client, and gains a Facebook surface where existing users can pull friends in.
- An bundled instant-messaging application lowers the friction of staying engaged with the world between sessions.
Second-order effects
- Rival virtual worlds face pressure to match both moves — Mac clients become table stakes, and Facebook integration becomes the default growth tactic for any consumer destination service.
- Facebook accumulates leverage as a traffic gatekeeper: services that depend on its plug-in ecosystem are effectively renting their growth funnel from a potential competitor.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform boundaries blur: destination worlds become features inside social networks, while social networks eventually build their own rich desktop clients — the arc that runs from There.com's plug-in to Facebook shipping Messenger apps for Mac and Windows a decade later.
- Cross-platform client support shifts from differentiator to baseline expectation, raising the cost of staying Windows-only for any consumer-facing service.
The trend: Consumer internet services increasingly borrow distribution from dominant social platforms and expand across operating systems, foreshadowing the convergence of virtual worlds, messaging, and social networks into unified desktop experiences.