Online spaces: The new frontier | CNET News.com
Online spaces: The new frontier | CNET News.com
On Thursday, there were more than a dozen venture capitalists in the room, a clear sign that investors are looking at virtual worlds as real opportunities to make money.…
Some here argued that the view of virtual worlds as potentially profitable ventures makes a conference like this much more attractive than it could have been even a year ago.
…While virtual-worlds enthusiasts acknowledge that MySpace and its ilk aren’t games, and aren’t virtual worlds the way that “WoW,” “EverQuest,” “Second Life” and others are, they do feel that the sense of community developed through virtual spaces means there are more similarities than many would think.
Steiger said that he’d like to see the spectrum of virtual worlds–”Second Life,” “WoW,” MySpace and so forth–move closer together by adding tools on each side that can give users more choices, more ability to interact on meaningful three-dimensional levels and more social-networking elements.
The more the tools, the greater the flexibility people will find in virtual worlds. That’s important, Ito suggested, because such flexibility could give people the scope to engage in complex interactions regardless of whether they feel like going questing in a game like “WoW,” hanging out in “Second Life” or having simple text chats as they can with instant messaging.
All of this adds up to a significant window of opportunity for Croquet. However, the Net abhors a vacuum and if Croquet developers don’t fill the building(pun intended) demand, others will.
[…] It’s worth noting that since SL hit the cover of Business Week in May, their membership has quadrupled. BusinessWeek has slides showing how major corporations are using Second Life. The article also mentions that other big names like Microsoft and Google are likely to get into the virtual world space which is something I’ve written about. I also see My Space as a likely player because Second Life is also a social network. […]
[…] Now that Second Life has more than a million members, it would appear that their idea of a “metaverse” has taken root. However, I think that Meshverse is a more appropriate term for the virtual world paradigm than Metaverse. Consequently, I am shifting my generic new paradigm posting to the Meshverse and confining this blog’s focus to Croquet specific topics. It’s intersting to note that when the Croquet 1.0 SDK appeared in April of this year, SL had about a hundred-fifty thousand members most of whom laughed at critics from the Croquet community. Now that their community has quadrupled and the product significantly improved, they don’t even pay attention. For all it’s shortcomings, SL is filling a vacuum that Croquet hasn’t. That said, I still see Croquet having a big impact over time because SL is greatly constrained by their architecture IMO - nobody likes the frequent client updates and grid downtime. So I am continuing to actively work with Croquet albeit slowly so I don’t expect to post here very often for the coming weeks or longer. […]
[…] only able to fill this vacuum riding the Smalltalk-based VisualAge IDE that Eclipse was born from. This is happening with Croquet and will continue to happen with Smalltalk-based innovations until and unless the community learns […]