Second Life

[Furiously]

I think the real problem with most of these open source things is that there's no way to have a semi-stable currency without a single owner game. And I really don't think we would see nearly the same number of user creations without the financial rewards--even if they only amount to more than paying tier for more than a few dozen people.

I totally agree, I think most will fail just due to the userbase not wanting to leave their...stuff. But with the open sourcing of the client, they will be able to take the good ideas. Blue Mars Will look wonderful, but just having the developer make the clothing/housing you just don't have the same amount of content.

As for SL being full of perverts....Yea. Hanging Out in Hard Alley or one of the hundreds of "Free Sex" rooms makes it seem that way, take another look, go take in a Maximillion Kleene live show. There's a lot more things to do then jerk off.

[MahrinSkel]

The educational world is HUGELY into SL. They tend to need:

a) realtime chat
b) voice chat
c) slideshows
d) privacy
e) scriptability for varied needs
f) free
g) no infrastructure setup

Name another virtual world where they get that?

1) There aren't any 2d environments that offer all the above (yet, bc Metaplace already offers most of that).

Umm....Raph?  You're soaking in it.  Everything you talk about, the old-fashioned Internet 1.0 does.  And it does it better, more transparently, more intuitively, and in multiple ways you can mix and match.

The "3D Web" never catches on because people don't *need* it.  It doesn't add anything.  You get all the intuitive baggage of realspace, but with all the confusion of being able to break the metaphor at any moment.  When 3D actually *adds* something, Java or Flash steps in and gives it to people, embedded into the 2D web pages.  On the other hand, 99% of the "webby" things that the "3D Web" does, it does in embedded 2D, badly.

What the "3D Web" is good for is very ornate rounds of "Let's Pretend".  "Let's pretend we're in Star Fleet."  "Let's pretend you're a horse and I'm a squirrel, and at least one of us is a girl."  Virtual LARPing.  And the most ornate and fantastical of them: "Let's pretend we're characters in a Neil Stephenson/Bruce Sterling novel, and this is all the prototype for Cyberspace."

--Dave

[Nyght]

Go easy on him now. He'll be looking for work like the rest of us soon....