Google has acquired SketchUp - a manufacturer of 3D software. This makes you think, especially if you've just been dealing with virtual 3D worlds. Could something like Second Life from Google be on the horizon in the long run? If you look at what multi-user 3D virtual environments need: render farms, disk space, network bandwidth, distributed architecture, delivery of massive amounts of data, user management, chat architecture, accounting system, payment processing - Google already has all of that. And the subscription model could be interesting for Google, as it is similar to the advertising stories.