Searching for Ron Britvich (part 2) (continued)
Roderick C. Moyes
In 1994 Ron Britvich saw the potential to use the Internet for more than just viewing flat, two-dimensional web pages. In 1999 he and co-creator Danny Viescas saw that the Web had become a maze, with no viable means to navigate through the endless sea of information in order to find exactly the information they were looking for. "Instead of spending hours sifting through search results and dead end links, why not let the information you want and only that information… come directly to you?"
RM: "So, what have you brought from your ActiveWorlds experience to your new project."
RB: "I wanted to try and extend the same concepts, and hopefully have learned from ActiveWorlds some of the interesting things about developing a community and doing things together. I wanted to extend it to allow people to share their creativity. There's always someone out there that knows the answer to a question or problem that you may have. I thought it would be nice if you could just push a few buttons and find the person or answer you need. ActiveWorlds was kind of an unstructured environment, people kind of did what they felt like doing. AskEarth gives the community environment some sense of structure that should have quite a bit of usefulness to people."
DV: "The community exists for a purpose, that is to answer the needs of the community. What is developing in AskEarth as we are going through things are the parallels to ActiveWorlds. Some of them were apparent from the very beginning, like accountability and having a unique name…but we've extended that, to say now that identity has a rating and feedback associated with it."
RM: "So this new project, AskEarth. Who's idea was it?"
DV: "I'd Say that it was a culmination of both of our ideas."
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