DISQUS

I do wish that they'd shipped this two years ago when I was starting Transmutable, but it is very encouraging to see this and the Khronos/Mozilla canvas 3D initiative.

An excellent survey.

Assuming that you haven't listed basic modules in most stacks, I'd add a few specific modules below the waterline:
Ajax
Comet
Image conversion
Audio and video conversion and streaming
Spatial simulation (for 2D and 3D spaces)

Above the waterline I'd add:
Asynchronous HTTP messaging with channels, filters, ... (until XMPP is in browsers)
Text chat
Audio groups
Image editing widgets (to crop avatars, tag images, ...)
Video rendering widget
2D and 3D space rendering widget

Good luck! I'll miss your UN coverage and new media wrangling, but new blood at ABC News has to be a good thing.

Thanks for the write-up, Deepak!

I think we're not too far from cities on the web. It only took $100M and 2000 man years to create Liberty City and the technologies and social structures underpinning an open, web based city are being built today.

Welcome to the Elliot Bay Area!

Actually, I was one of the people pissed off that the project management team was "fired" but I didn't realize it had happened until long after most of that team had left the building. At that point what's the point of complaining?

Not that the group didn't argue and complain about everything else. :-)

One major role of project managers is wrangling the dev team away from four hour arguments about database schema and towards goal oriented development, and it's clear from what I saw in the dev team dynamics that we didn't ship on Sunday because nobody played that role.

To be clear, I'm not sure that a dedicated pm team is the right answer but I do believe that the lack of that role was directly responsible for our not shipping. Would there have been more pull in dev from a pm team lead than the apparently weak pull from the heads of the other teams? I guess we need another Startup Weekend to run another experiment.

I've been Trevor Steptoe in SL only since late 2004 and I'm in awe of what's happened in the short time since I first landed on the mainland. But tonight I started using the Whirled alpha and together with Metaplace it seems like 2008 is going to be chock full of variations on the "world as canvas" which made SL so special.

I can't help but wonder if the novelty seeking nature of early SL adopters is going to send them off to new worlds just like it did for The Sims Online and others before it. Without the intense creativity of the early adopters, what is a world as canvas?

As someone who has been in startups in the bay area and is now a CEO for a startup in Seattle, the number one reason to move to SF is because people in SF like to work with people in SF.

I'll probably be back soon enough.

At first I thought you meant that the game of tag needed tags, which made less sense.

*runs up and slaps "secondlife" and "libsecondlife" on you, shouting "Tag!"*

The question isn't whether we're going to make the metaverse but whether we're going to pay the Lindens to do play a part in that process.

Stop whining about the whiners.

I am excited about browser based virtual worlds, not just from the project that I work on but from all sorts of groups like Pelican Crossing (Blink3D) and Three Rings (Whirled).

The spaces range from light weight, quick loading 3D views which merge with 2D web content in webish ways (think flash widgets on Flickr, not full page horrors) to more immersive worlds which just happen to arrive in your browser.

Sometimes people in pain strike out at others. Who hasn't snapped at someone they love at the end of a hard day? Lordfly, like so many people, is having a tough time using Second Life and his post is a symptom of that pain. It's also a signal that he needs to work on his anger management skills, stop making excuses about being plain spoken, and recognize the difference between truth and misdirected anger. But, it's always easier to point out what other people need to do than to change ourselves, no?

On the other hand, the bogus marketspeak of most company representatives has numbed us to the point that when someone like Torley comes along and presents a quirky, human voice then we're shocked. The context of corporate communications just doesn't support that sort of personal exposure because it's emotionally exhausting for the spokesman. For the rest of us, it feels less like a personal violation when a faceless corporate drone tells us that we should enjoy the pain we've bought. When an actual person tells us we're screwed then we believe him, and that makes us angry.

Good luck, Torley. I don't envy your position.

I used iShowU on OS X with good results. It has auto-pan but doesn't have a post processing mode for after-the-fact pan and zoom.

Hey, it was good to chat with you, but I had to take off before we could get into details about web based 3D spaces.   One (somewhat wicked) thought I had was to use libsecondlife to transliterate a SL scene into a public web based 3D space which could be accessed via applet (sans login).  People could use it to monitor their land without having to fire up the ever updating SL client.