3pointD.com

Microsoft technical evangelist Robert Scoble has a long and very perceptive post on his blog (and on WebProNews, via Glitchy) that’s mostly about how Microsoft can become a leaner, kinder and gentler technology machine, and take away the “karmic power” of the blogger known as “Mini-Microsoft” (who is not a fan of the company). What interests me more about the post, however, is how Scoble characterizes the generation that’s just about to enter high school. He calls it “the Second Life generation” — although readers of this blog know it better as the 3pointD generation. I’m not sure if even Scoble realizes just how 3pointD they’re going to be, though. (more…)

I’m just leaving my desk for the moment, but this is significant: Viacom is buying cross-game social networking site Xfire for $102 million in cash, according to this press release. More when 3pointD returns.

Besides showing up on the cover of Business Week, Second Life has recently begun attracting the kind of people that could not only draw many more residents to the virtual world, but who could also draw major technology companies and other developers in, which could lead to a paradigm shift in what’s happening on the SL Grid.

“It’s crack for my brain,” says former MTV VJ Adam Curry, on a recent podcast. Curry — who has bought a castle in SL and wants to retire there — seems to have gotten the place immediately, describing at as “a platform.” Microsoft’s Robert Scoble, who’s also been poking around SL lately, goes further, describing the place as an operating system. Leo Laporte of This Week in Tech, the most popular podcast on the Web, has also been avatarized lately (under the great name Pruneface Spatula), and is equally excited. What’s important here is that these guys, for the most part, see the world not as a fantasy realm that’s just good for getting your freak on (despite Laporte’s fascination with nude skins), but as a place where powerful development is possible. (more…)

This article from CNet’s Daniel Terdiman describes the ongoing server problems that have been plaguing World of Warcraft lately. With 6 million subscribers, the company must be running something close to 1,000 servers, each one supporting several thousand accounts. Unfortunately, they seem to be crashing a lot lately. Could it be that Blizzard has topped out its ability to maintain the hardware that runs its world? This is something Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, has contemplated in the past. Part of their rationale for eventually moving to a more open-source model, as they’ve discussed doing, is that it will soon become impossible for them to run and maintain all the servers necessary to support a growing population. LL already runs close to 2,300 servers in support of its world. What’s the cut-off point? If the pace of growth picks up too much for either WoW or SL, it will simply be physically iimpossible to put on new servers fast enough to support the population explosion. How do you decide when it’s time to throw in the towel and let users host their own servers, or move to a more Web-like model in which service providers rent space to individuals? Because that, I think, will eventually be the future for virtual worlds.

My feedreader somehow got borked this morning and I’ve had to clear its cache. As a result, I have no feeds to read and now I’m spending the morning repopulating all those links in a new copy of the program. Most annoying. We expect normal service to resume shortly.

One of my World of Warcraft guildies (not that I have time to visit Azeroth lately; I don’t know how Joi Ito does it) passes along this link, in which a LiveJournal user called MonkeyModulator describes a World of Warcraft plug-in he’s writing: an eBay-style reputation system for use by players within the world.

Somebody up and leave your group in the middle of an instance? Just leave them negative feedback. Find an awesome player to group with? Leave them positive feedback. Before grouping with anybody, pull up their feedback (preferably inside the game.) (more…)