Societies have long experienced disruptive change in the wake of epic battles. Horus/Set, Abel/Cain, Remus/Romulus, Allies/Axis, Apple/IBM, Microsoft/IBM, and Netscape/Microsoft.  It's been four years since the last 3D Printing update here on the MJ and a lot has changed:

3D printing is already a viable commercial business where highly customized parts are needed for such applications as rare cars, aircraft, or medical devices like knee joints.  You can start with precision scanning or a computer design, and can make a perfectly customized replacement part.  In medicine it’s no longer theory but increasingly common, in particular in fabricating dental prosthetics.  Make a 3D image from scratch, or make a 3D scan of an object, send it to the printer – feed in the appropriate ceramic, metal, or plastic powder, melt or fuse with lasers or electron beams and the part appears in thin air.  It is pretty exciting, pretty cool.

Forbes: Manufacturing, 3D Printing and What China Knows About the Emerging American Century

The video at 3D Printing Will Revive American Manufacturing is compelling and Karlgaard's 2015-2025 timeframe is in the ballpark but not spot on in my view. The revival will be in full swing by 2015 - this is where the Google Plus/Facebook battle factors into the convergence of virtual currencies with virtual and digitally manufactured goods. In 2007's Assessing The State of Rapid Manufacturing I noted

In a nutshell, “rapid manufacturing” is poised for an unprecedented explosion of growth in the next 3 to 5 years. To see why this potential exists, it’s necessary to examine a broad set of shaping factors. If only a single segment is explored, significant growth looks to be much further out but when one takes into account the converging sources of influences and innovation at work, a different perspective emerges. in this regard it is helpful to examine some other patterns of technology evolution.

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At some point I expect that Fed-Ex/Kinkos will probably throw their hat in the ring and some distributed manufacturing network startup will have a huge IPO. Perhaps more significantly, a new type of product or service that hasn’t been thought of yet will emerge(think Lotus 1-2-3 or Amazon).

It should be an interesting battle - Google has SketchUp, Google Earth, Checkout, Gmail and now Plus, but Facebook has Credits, Farmville and other gaming resources. Either or both of them can move quickly by acquiring  Linden Lab(Second Life) or Teleplace and leveraging their respective growing open source communities. One way or another, social networks will play a central role in the emergence of desktop manufacturing and the winner of the Google Plus/Facebook battle will likely have to contend with a new kid on the block. The desktop manufacturing wave won't dominate for a decade - with the near exponential growth in cloud and quantum computing, by 2025 we're in Singularity territory.

Facebook Credits: Tonight's reports say you'll be able to buy Deals with Facebook Credits! They will be the first real-world, non-virtual goods that will be available for purchase with this new currency. Kids are going to burn through this stuff like there's no tomorrow. Load up with Credits with the intention of giving it to Zynga for Cityville crap and end up spending it at The Gap instead. Or vice-versa. When beloved national retailers start offering goods and lower prices to customers who pay with a new, virtual currency - that's when said virtual currency becomes a force to reckon with. Somebody call Congress and the Federal Reserve - it's time to start having some serious conversations. Update: Facebook PR contacted us and said that at launch, you will not be able to buy physical goods with Facebook Credits. Rather you will be able to get things like vouchers that you can redeem at events.

Perhaps most importantly, users will be able to buy Deals using Facebook Credits, paving a smooth path between a virtual currency and real-world goods and services. 

It's been over four years since I noted that figuring out how to build the next web was The 64 Billion Question. Some thought it seemed like a huge stretch then. Even a year later when Mitch Kapor called virtual worlds a $100B opportunity, most folk were dismissive. Flash forward to last week at the Virtual Goods Summit 2010 in San Francisco, where Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins said he had no doubt about the size of the market and proceeded to do the math: 

So, of course, we've seen a number of years go by and this expansion in virtual goods so there's just now really no questions about this enormous potential and the way I get it to 100 billion mathematically even though it was only a $1 billions last year in the US because it was $7 billion in China and, of course, over their in Asia they built the mobile web first that started with DOCOMO in Japan in 1999. The Koreans copied that. The Koreans invented the internet cafe, they got broadband into the home pretty fast. The Chinese started copying what was going on in Korea and here are these markets over in Asia where they are far more advanced in mobile web, microtransactions, virtual goods and in China it was a $7 billion market last year. Well, the Western world has about eight and half times more gross domestic product so if we had merely kept pace, we would already in the West have a $60 billion virtual goods market not a $1 billion market, again, we're talking last year and then you would have seven in China, then you'd have Japan, then you'd have Korea you add it all up and probably by this year the global total would be around $100 billion. We could already be there.

video here

More conservative views are expecting 31% growth in the U.S. virtual goods market for 2011 which could add $250M to Facebook revenues. For a more detailed look see the excellent article 9 Reasons Why It Might Be Time For Marketers to Value Virtual Goods.