DISQUS

Thank god. Hopefully Obama won't feel a pressing need to "negotiate" w/ Repubs when it comes to fumigating the FDA....

The new year will become an interesting time for virtual worlds as a whole as many of them are launching.

Very interesting to see the expectations from the CEO of Linden Lab.

It will be interesting to follow up on how Sony does with their virtual world. I hope they won't quit as fast as Google did with their world. It's good to see that a company like Sony shows interest for virtual worlds and the Metaverse and help to expand it.

There seems to become no end on the every growing world made by Linden Lab.

Virtual worlds are getting more mainstream and more grids like Second Life are coming online as we speak. People will find new usage for virtual worlds, there is no doubt about that and some good things can come out of that. It has already been proven simulated enviroments can be used for other things besides just plain entertainment or 3D chatrooms. As virtual worlds will become more advanced this new technology will open doors for all kinds of applications. These things take time but interesting projects will take place and people will find benefits from the usage of virtual worlds.

Count Burks

Dreamworld
http://www.virtualworld.sl

It is a complete outrage from Linden Lab to just increase the price for openspaces by 67% without any reason at all but increasing their profit margin. About 2 months back their new CEO posted a blog where you explicitly stated how profitable that Linden Lab is as a company, how much money they were making of their customer base. It seems that making a lot of money and profit wasn't enough for Second Life, they want more so they keep going on to milk money out of their customers, not just a bit of money but a lot of money. If you calculate the amount of openspace regions in Second Life times 50 USD you end up with an amount of about 10 million USD extra income for Linden Lab per year. This is not calculating all the openspaces that are going to be dumped by their owners which should also be a large amount. 1000's of people bought their openspace for 250 USD and now they have to pay up in january or Linden will close down their land which they bought and paid for.
Such business practises show no integrity at all, companies who pull such a stunt made their reputation for the future with the general public.

Does the internet have any standards? The internet is still a place of anarchy, even today, more regulation and legislation became over the years as the internet developed itself into a frequently used medium as we know it today. Standards and protocols is something that will grow over time and will get implemented as this new technology moves forward. There is no point into trying to force these things. What is good is that more people create grids and do their thing as they see it. Over time certain grids will link towards each other, I'm convinced all this will sort out itself when the demand is there.

There will become a new form of unwalled virtual worlds in the future which are build by people or groups of people by using a particular platform. After a while these worlds will start to link to each other and will commence to form a network over time. This is not something that will happen tomorrow or in the next year but over time interoperability between virtual worlds will take place. It's hard to put a date on this but I don't think this will happen in the near future despite the willingness of certain companies to make this happen.

Lively still has a long way to go, some described it as a flop. There is potential for this platform as it is a good way for people to get their first experience with a virtual world before they move on to something more advanced.