I’m thinking no one mentioned Open Croquet because it’s not really a world that others can go to yet; only a small group of programmers “in the know” can understand how to use it, make things with it, etc. So it isn’t really a world yet. It’s not even a walled garden. It’s a vest pocket.

I would have liked to hear more on the 2D to 3D trend and the events that define this pattern. The new medium is more compelling on a visceral level, but it’s far from being mainstream for a whole host of reasons (some of which you have mentioned). From Jerry’s experience in the field of accelerating technology, what is the exact need (s?) these environments are filling?

Tony Parisi’s presentation was interesting…was kinda surprised he (and no one else) mentioned OpenCroquet.

As for the techie side of things, it would have been good to have a Linden Lab representative present to see if the company was heading at all in the open source direction. This could impact a few of the alternative models we have heard.

That means many things:

* the world data should be distributed and replicated over the clients – it should either kept in sync (opencroquet teatime-style) or allowed to fork and merge together again (git/mercurial/… style).

* distributed trust metrics to figure out which people are following the “world rules” and whose changes can be trusted to conform to the “rules” (the set of rules you as a client want to track).

* having world objects+vm code (which can be what a “website” is now), and making it possible for these to live and run on different clients (at the same time) if needed.

As long as you have a world running on a server park somewhere, it won’t be truly open and scalable.

I’d urge all readers to study my critiques of Beth Noveck on my blog, and not limit themselves to just “going to Beth Noveck and State of Play”. State of Play, first of all, is in Singapore this year, because Beth herself is teaching there, but it’s inconvenienced a lot of people, and made it far more expensive for them to come unless they are from wealthy universities and game companies. ‘

Second, though she has written the state-of-the-art paper on democracy and online groups, her work in SL was extremely limited — she barely logged on and only then to give a couple of her canned presentations. So I don’t feel she has the wealth of experience of this particular virtual world needed to really grapple with our issues in it.

Beth represents one school of thought, about elevating groups created online to the status of the main actors of society, and “leaving behind as outdated” individuals, corporations, governments, claiming that representative government is “oldfashioned” corrupt, non-accountable, etc. — as if nonce groups of anonymous avatars are going to be more accountable. I find this extremism. I’m concerned about individual rights, and the problems of how groups can become “group-think” and “lynch-mob” just as much as they can be collaborative and smart mob.

Um, actually, I’m not loathed by “many, many second life” residents, but just a small elitist group, of the kind of cadre of the sort you might fit into — arrogant young 20-something tekkie college kids : )

I find a real male/female breakdown on these issues. The males who become technologically proficient in these tools become hugely possessive and arrogant about the knowledge and trying to keep it a wizard-password-protected sort of domain — it’s part of a kind of insecurity/security thing they are going to establish themselves, I guess, a kind of tribal ritual. If you looked around the room, you saw way less women there, and of those there, a few tended to be accompanying girlfriends serving food, or else older women who are able to brave the arrogance and condescending nature of these tekkie young men who feel its their domain. Older women are often felt to be “verbose” when they say something in disagreement with young men : )

My notes are here if you would like to get beyond this biased take:

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2006/08/what_is_the_met.html#comments

There are LOTS more kinds of people in the Metaverse than your kind — get used to it. The very notion of “troll” comes from the insular and closed culture of MMORPGs and their idiotic fanboyz forums. I think you’ll find significant differences between that culture and a broader culture of intellectuals who believe in freer discourse.

Yes it’s still aspirational to talk about true interoperability. I do think it’s important to see interoperability as having two levels that are complimentary and move at different speeds, though: a technical level and a social level. The level of technical interoperability is the sticking point you’re talking about, but it’s the people if not always yet the code that are flooding over top of and back and forth between the silos, grabbing from here, pointing to there, pulling this and that together, aggregating the spread, and that puts pressure back on the technologies to start working together.

Check out Justin Hall’s short video about the idea of “passively multi-player online games” for an example of the kind of social interoperability I mean. Finding a way to make everything online fit into one interoperable personal universe even if the individual technologies and applications don’t talk to each other yet. It’s also aspirational in that it isn’t a finished reality, but I believe it represents the sweep and spirit of some of the most profound changes that are happening.

> I get the same reaction to people talking about ‘interoperability’ in web 2.0 silos that I do when I hear people talk about ‘innovation’ in general- much more empty talk and deliberate misrepresentation than there is actual substance. But it certainly would be nice if I were wrong. :)

I may not always be right (oh to be human), but I think I’m on the right track, and may someone shoot me if I ever deliberately misrepresent something! lol

Look me up in the city sometime. I want to keep getting together with the people who are interested in continuing to explore all this and build more of that substance. And since I’m here now I’d love to see New York stand up straight and become more of a creative captial as far as this goes ;). And BTW on that note it looks like State of Play is leaving us to go globe and coast hopping! :O

I definitely agree that participation is at the core of what I’d consider to be web 2.0; there is a lot of substantive work going on there. On the interoperability side, while I hear it a lot, and see the occasional interesting mashup, I don’t feel like there is much there there, I guess. I get the same reaction to people talking about ‘interoperability’ in web 2.0 silos that I do when I hear people talk about ‘innovation’ in general- much more empty talk and deliberate misrepresentation than there is actual substance. But it certainly would be nice if I were wrong. :)

> Says web 2.0 is defined by masively interoperability between sites. Ed.: this sounds like the most cracked out definition of web 2.0 i’ve ever heard, but I heard this idea a couple times tonight. So I have to figure out why it offends me so- I guess because sure, some websites now offer APIs, which was effectively unheard of 18 months ago, but the APIs feel so limited when compared to raw data access and true data-level interoperability. But I need to think on that more.

Hehe, I love “cracked out” :). I do think the sweep and spirit of people participating in site content and applications widgetizing to work together can be summed up as approaching interoperability. So for the short story I say “participation and interoperability” are the defining characteristics of what’s happening on the web. (For another view there’s this hysterical video. :)

In large part the conversation about the metaverse at this stage comes from applying these principles to virtual worlds and graphical game spaces. That’s the young revolution that I’ve been following most closely.

Here are those State of Play videos I mentioned (on the left-hand column). Didn’t mean to put the lid on that conversation, we were just hitting the end of the night.

Stay in touch!