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…)

It’s Ogle Earth again, this time with a very cool tour of a few spots in Google Earth that you access from within a video podcast. All it is, really, is KML links embedded in a podcast, but it’s a very nice proof of concept. Watch the podcast, click the links as they come up, and you’re automatically flown within Google Earth to the locations in question. You can do this from within Google Earth’s own Web browser, apparently, which would be extra useful — although I couldn’t manage to get the links to work on my PC, for some reason, and on my Mac I couldn’t get the GEarth Web browser to come up, so I haven’t actually looked at it this way, only from Firefox. But it works fine that way, and opens up some very cool new multi-media possibilities. I look forward to more.

VRCO Inc. is a company that specializes in creating interactive 3D visual representations of various kinds. “VRCO’s business is immersive environments and we wish to enable as many applications as possible,” reads its Web site. A lot of its products seem to be middleware apps that allow other apps to communicate in 3D, or which translate between “flat” data into 3D representations. Now, Ogle Earth has posted a comment from VRCO senior software engineer Todd Yocum, in which Yocum describes his company as being “probably the closest there is to having GE in a Metaverse at the moment.” (more…)

A new mapping service has now gone live on YellowPages.com that allows users looking up businesses to map their locations using Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, according to this press release. You can see maps, satellite views and low-angle “birds-eye” views, where available, get directions, and even search by distance from a particular address, which is nice. The search function feels a bit wonky and I had trouble finding anything with birds-eye available, but note that, as the press release read, “In March 2006, the YELLOWPAGES.COM Network reached 27.3 million monthly unique users.” Who will now be mapping things via MS Virtual Earth.

[UPDATE: Seems the video I was hoping for is not yet ready for prime time. The NMC prefers to wait for a fully edited piece. We’ll update you when it’s available.] (more…)

Croquet Mars connected via “hyper-portal” to another Croquet space

Aldo Castaneda at The Story of Digital Identity sends along the news that the Croquet Project, an open-source platform for creating 3D online environments, released a beta version of its SDK a few days ago. According to the Croquet news page, this is “the first complete public release of the core Croquet technology.” One of the most intriguing things about Croquet is that Croquet spaces can be connected via “hyper-portals,” so that a number of users could create a web (as in 3D Web?) of connected Croquet spaces and even spaces within spaces, etc. That’s right in line with a vision of the evolving 3D online space as a number of tangentially connected 3D spaces, rather than the contiguous Grid of Second Life. So pick up the SDK and let us know what you make of with it.

Yuku is yet another social-software site, this time one that lets you blog, share images and create your own message boards all in one place. Notably, it lets you maintain up to five different profiles on the same account. This is a distant cousin to the identity aggregator for virtual worlds that I’d like to see. But Yuku probably won’t have the right kind of hooks out to those places. Mashable’s Pete Cashmore addresses a related question when he asks whether this kind of “everythingitis” can fly. His answer: No. Start-ups like Yuku should stay away from the all-services portal, in Cashmore’s view. “Specialized services that weave their way into the fabric of the web via open APIs and web widgets will likely see more growth,” he says.

Music site Pitchfork has a nice piece today on the live music scene in Second Life. In fact, you can check that scene out for yourself tomorrow, when City Stages streams part of its music festival live into the virtual world, at 1:00pm Pacific time in the Menorca region of SL. “Is this a sneak preview of the future,” asks Pitchfork, “where our grandkids will plug in Matrix-style to Woodstock 2069, and instead of complaining about the pigs and the overpriced water, everyone stands around bitching about lag?” You bet.

The recently released Google Data APIs (”a new protocol based on Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0″) feature a couple of interesting geolocative elements I just learned about through Stefan Geens’ excellent Ogle Earth blog. These include a tag for latitude, longitude and elevation, one for a place such as an event location, and one for a postal address. These are the kind of tools we need for creating 3pointD apps — i.e., apps that harness the collaborative power of Web 2.0, but which take the “placeness” of both virtual worlds and the world around us into account. (more…)

EON Reality Inc. is offering its EON Raptor 5.5 as a free 3dsMax plug-in “that enables you to display and interact with 3ds Max content in real-time with intuitive controls,” and “explore and share your models in full virtual reality,” according to a press release. The system seems to layer a user-friendly GUI-based point-and-click interface over 3ds Max’s authoring system, allowing users to not only create Web-based or standalone 3D environments, but share and interact with them as well. I’m not clear on how this could be made to interoperate on a broader basis, but you can get a free 30-day trial of 3ds Max at the Autodesk link above, so it will be interesting to see what the more ambitious 3pointDers out there come up with.

Business Week is running a Second Life package in its current issue — a cover story, no less, complete with podcast. The package starts here, and of course features Anshe Chung, the world’s most famous real-estate magnate, whose avatar is plastered across the magazine’s cover. Though the piece calls the SL scene “seriously weird,” it’s also one of the first to take the business aspect of VWs seriously, including mention of Microsoft’s Robert Scoble’s interest in SL, and, unfortunately, the $100,000 purchase of a space station in Project Entropia, now Entropia Universe that turned out to have been made by someone working for the company. All in all, though, it’s good, balanced, recommended reading.

In case you haven’t already noticed, Mia Garlick, General Counsel of Creative Commons, will give a live talk in Second Life tonight on copyright issues and “Some Rights Reserved” licensing. Head to Kula Island, the Kula 4 sim, coordinates (75, 75), at 6:00pm Pacific time for the one-hour talk, hosted by SL resident Genevieve Julot

Just spent a brief minute signing up over at ziki (here’s mine), the new social-software site that lets you aggregate your own content in one place and also tag yourself. The content aggregation could be a powerful way to move your media, but I’m also a big fan of the tagging idea, especially as it relates to virtual worlds. What I’d really like to see is a piece of social software that allows you to link your identity in one virtual world to your identity in another. I’ve written about this idea on Walkerings once or twice before, as well as in The Escapist. I’d really like to see some kind of world-straddling communications network emerge from this kind of thing. Xfire is something like it, but it’s not as open or powerful as what I have in mind. We’re due for some kind of VW-2.0 mashup very soon, I think. It will be interesting to see who does it and how.

Steve Rubel flags what could be an alarming trend: Google is apparently going to start charging for access to its AdWords API. “If charging for API data becomes more widespread among the big players, it will slow innovation,” Rubel says. The difference here is that AdWords is specifically a revenue-producing app, so it may be more understandable that Google charge for it. If other open APIs come in for the same treatment, though, it could certainly have a chilling effect on innovation.

When more than 2,000 real estate agents and executives gather in San Francisco this July for a big real estate and technology conference, one of the people they’ll hear from is David Fleck, Vice President of Marketing at Linden Lab, makers of Second Life. Fleck will present on “Virtual Real Estate: What must we learn from gamers, immersive online communities and their addictive, artificial worlds of ‘real’ estate?”, according to this press release. (more…)

The Holman family, together in Guild Wars

Nice to see that the Washington Post today has an unabashedly positive spin on massively multiplayer online games and their power give far-flung family and friends a different way to connect.

Although computer games have often been thought of as a pastime for the antisocial, communal online worlds such as the one in Guild Wars are the hottest things in games these days. . . . Game companies don’t track how many families play online games together, but they say the trend helps drive their popularity. Some families play games to maintain contact from far-flung towns; some parents play online games with their kids in the next room as a way of bonding with them. Game designer Jack Emmert, at Guild Wars publisher NCsoft Corp., played his own game, City of Heroes, to stay in touch when his brother was serving in the Army and based in Korea.

I think I can count a dozen instances of this kind of thing that I know of. Nice to see it get some wider readership.

The Games for Change conference is taking sessions proposals until April 25th. The conference will be held June 27th and 28th at Parsons, the New School for Design, in New York City, and will feature a keynote by author Steven Johnson of Everything Bad is Good for You. More details below: (more…)

Sir Bruce Sterling Woodock has new population figures up on his excellent MMOGChart site, which tracks the population of massively multiplayer online games as well as a few virtual worlds like Second Life. Sir Bruce’s new data only covers up to about January of this year, but it’s worth slappping an eye on his charts, as his site is about the only one tracking numbers like these (plus it’s pretty). That said, there’s not much that’s terribly notable to report this time around (a new release is coming soon, according to the site). Asheron’s Call and Ultima Online continue to bleed customers, RuneScape continues to climb and, interestingly, A Tale in the Desert and World War II Online, though both small, seem to have leveled off without dropping customers for some time. Sir Bruce still has World of Warcraft at 4.5 million, though it’s since passed 6 million, I believe. Then there’s the issue of Second Life. (more…)

[Via Glitchy:] The Prefix magazine blog has an entry about the band Arctic Monkeys and the fact that their MySpace profile reportedly fetched more than $2,000 on eBay. The eBay auction had apparently been invalidated and removed from the site by the time I clicked through from Prefix. The sale (or attempted sale) is part of what’s been a recent surge in sales of MySpace profiles that have a large number of friends, which are apparently being farmed by marketers looking for new ways to reach potential customers. What’s especially amusing in this case is that (a) the Arctic Monkeys themselves seems to have little idea of who or what MySpace is, and (b) MySpace is said to have been partly responsible for the band’s rise to the top of the UK charts. More interesting from a 3pointD perspective, though, is the financial value of a broad friends network, and the privacy implications of such a sale. If I link to you, are you free to sell my link to someone? How much am I worth as a link, anyway? The Arctic Monkeys’ friends — all 49,450 of them — were valued at about 4 cents apiece. Surely I’m worth more than that?

Want to know what’ll be happening in the metaverse in a decade’s time? A group of metaversal thinkers (myself included) will get together in California next month to start hacking out their vision of what might come to pass. The Metaverse Roadmap is a project of the Acceleration Studies Foundation that will seek to come up with “a 10-year scenario, possibility, and challenge document for the development of the 3D Web” and related 3pointD technologies (including massively multiplayer online games, virtual worlds like Second Life, social software and Web 2.0 apps, among other things). [Press release.] It promises to be a heady event, with participants including Corey Bridges of Multiverse, Esther Dyson, Randy Farmer of Yahoo! and John Hanke of Google Earth, among others. The public is invited to participate as well, through an open wiki and mailing list, though I’m not sure whether these have been implemented yet. I’ll be blogging the event, and (with any luck) Johnny Ming of SecondCast will be podcasting things at some point. If nothing else, the resulting document will be fascinating look at some of the more blue-sky ideas that are knocking around the 3pointD world at this point. And plans are to update the roadmap on a recurring basis in order to keep pace with whatever does come to pass. Hopefully, it will be a document that will foster new ideas, new directions and new developments in all aspects of 3pointD.

The Make Magazine Makers Faire kicks off this Saturday, April 22, in San Mateo, California. See what people are making in the real world these days. Of course, the virtual world will be represented as well. Linden Lab will be there, demo’ing their virtual world and the ways it can interact with the real one. Fun.

Second Life resident Tateru Nino’s blog mentions a Community Fair that’s on in SL for the next two weeks.

Want to find out more about being a volunteer in SL? Swing by the booth and collect some info. Learn more about the Live Music Scene in SL, or Deevyde Maelstrom’s particular brand of Mad Science. Learn more about our residents with Autism, SL’s New Resident support organisations, RL work in SL, the Foundation For Rich Content, Art and Sculpture, SL Parks and Recreation Services and yet more.

More information in this SL forum thread. Click in the SLurlPane at the top of the right column here to visit, while the link lasts, or just click here.

Another collaborative map-tagging app I’ve just run across (via we-make-money-not-art) is Blue Puddle, which lets users create, tag and even combine maps that “draw on users´ collective memory and subjective experience of a city. These maps foster the emergence of stories about the city that are more rich than any single author could create.”

Blue Puddle joins apps like Platial and Community Walk in what seems to be a rapidly growing collaborative map-tagging space. 3pointD.com, of course, has its own collaborative map going on over at Community Walk (chosen from the field for no particular reason). The map is open to all, so we encourage you to go tag up your favorite 3pointD-related sites.

Forbes.com discovers virtual worlds today, but slightly misses the point. Their article on Reshaping Reality hits a couple of good points, but winds up characterizing virtual worlds as something too removed from the world around us. (more…)

Clickable Culture’s Tony Walsh sends word of a virtual London that’s been released by ImageCat Inc., who are creating 3D models for use in risk management by sectors like insurance, asset management and security. The model was created using satellite imagery from a company called DigitalGlobe, but what’s most interesting is that the model “can be visualized using popular online and off-the-shelf software packages including GoogleEarth, MSN Virtual Earth, VRML, ESRI 3D Analyst and other common GIS applications,” according to a press release. (more…)

Guest #388

DutchPIPE is a new (alpha-version) free system for creating “Persistent Interactive Page Environments.” The sytem uses DOM, XHTML, Javascript, PHP and AJAX, and is built on an abstract, object-oriented architecture similar to the LPMuds of the late 1980s. While it’s hard to get an idea from the Web site of just what DutchPIPE will be capable of, the site proposes uses including eCommerce, social software and the construction of virtual worlds. There’s some hint that it might become interoperable with other virtual worlds, or that user-owned, DutchPIPE-built spaces would be able to connect to one another. Basically it sounds like an open-source, distributed version of MySpace with perhaps a bit more functionality. This could be an interesting thing to have around, if it were to catch on. Hard to tell at the moment whether DutchPIPE will be it, though. Graphics look pretty limited, but I did find it notable that as soon as I got to the page and became Guest #388 I was assigned an avatar that wore glasses, favored neckties and was blessed with unruly hair (though of a different color), just as I am in real life. Now that’s impressive functionality. [Via vgs-rss.]

TotalVideoGames.com has an interesting feature up today on Multiverse, the third-party development platform for massively multiplayer online games. While it doesn’t have all that much new to say, there is an interesting passage toward the end of the piece in which it’s pointed out that Multiverse’s flagship project, Kothuria (currently in closed beta), is planned as “the first moddable MMOG,” and will be available to developers for free. Users will be able to host their own versions of the game and tweak the mechanics — or anything else, for that matter — as they see fit. If this works, it should make the universe of MMOs a much more interesting place. MMO game design could arguably benefit from a more open-source approach, and releasing a moddable MMO is one way to spur thatkind of development. And from a gamer’s perspective (this gamer’s perspective, at any rate), Kothuria sounds like a pretty interesting game: (more…)