The 64 Billion Dollar Question
What happens when a massively multi-player environment has millions of participants?
Right now only World of Warcraft can ask this now and the answer so far amounts to “Houston, we have a problem”:
“I don’t know how much I fault (Blizzard), since many of my own companies have had scaling problems,” said Joi Ito, a venture capitalist who has put money into well-known online outfits such as Technorati, and who runs a WoW guild–or team–filled with other tech executives and well-known bloggers. “However, the uptime is really not (at an acceptable) level for a real commercial service, so I hope they get better.”
In order for this collaboration in 3D paradigm to become the next web, it has to scale better, much better. This is the real potential upside Croquet’s network architecture promises to uncork:
We propose a combination of the peer-to-peer networking present in Croquet with a distributed mesh of Worldbase servers acting as metadata and object repositories and a layer of Interactivity servers. The Interactivity servers provide persistence for locales within the virtual space and integration with existing federated authentication infrastructures.
A Croquet related discussion of Dump The World Wide Web is relevant here.
[…] A Meshed-up Jungle Is Born By lr This is the answer to the $64B question. It’s also a good description of how the GriotVision multicasting ecosystem will emerge. Take a content mesh connected by a mesh network of devices and wrap it in a 3D mesh(think Croquet or Second Life). Throw it on top of a mesh of computers for computation and storage, then step back cause things will happen quickly! As strange as it may sound, consumers are way ahead of most enterprises when it comes to using grids (and paying for them). Most of us live on the grid at home - we use Google and Yahoo!, we love eBay, we upload and share photos and movies, and gather our news from various sources on the web. Most of us bank from home, we leverage network email services - and if you think about it, that transformation all occurred within the last decade. In the blink of an eye. […]
Strictly Biological…
Even taken with a very large grain of salt, the effects implied by futurist Ray Kurzweil’s predictions are more profound than the personal computer or web combined:
By 2027, he predicts, computers will surpass humans in intelligence; by 2045 or s…
Why Second Life Will Get A Third Life…
Although Second Life has some significant architectural and operational issues, it has an established virtual currency economy, strong backing, huge mindshare and can arguably claim to be The World’s Biggest Programming Environment. The latter po…