jeremy snyder’s meta|remix

in the session yesterday, raph koster made an analogy of how quickly cell phones were developed and said that there were some virtual world technologies back in the late 70s and avatars already in 1985 and that in that frame of reference, virtual world adoption has been slow. but i don’t know if i agree, because cell phones took a long time to get developed and adopted, too. they existed in the 70s and had to overcome all of their technical challenges (battery life and size, range, towers, etc) and their business challenges (pricing that was affordable to people). probably virtual worlds just have to do all of these things first. there are parallels to almost all of these pieces in virtual worlds. for instance, the cell towers are like the infrastructure parallel to bandwidth. virtual worlds also need a network effect that helps bring the critical mass of users so that you go in because everyone else is in and you need to in order to get all the things you need to do done. the same happened for cell phones and was in fact actively encouraged through programs like fave 5 or in-network groups who all use the same carrier.

so in the end, i think it’s really about the same problem in a different environment and different implementation, and it will take time in virtual worlds as well.

so i’m here in the bay area at a conference and the conference is largely cool. but one thing that kind of makes me scratch my head is the number of stealthy startups. Continue reading »

joey seiler over at virtual worlds news has posted a nice summary of my presentation at the metaverse roadmap meeting last friday.

you can see my notes from yesterday’s metaverse roadmap meeting on the metaversum blog at http://metaversum.com/blog/notes-from-metaverse-roadmap-meeting-feb-15-2008/.

a few other thoughts:

• the energy level fell a bit in the afternoon, probably just exhaustion and jetlag. the morning was more intense, so it was to be expected
• there were two ideas from my own thoughts that really stuck with me yesterday from my own conversations. the first was “trust escrow” where two users share trust in a platform, and through that platform and profile matching, they transitively trust each other.
• the second idea was “selective reflection” where mirror worlds are not a 100% copy of the real world, but maybe only reflect 80% of real-world systems or concepts. and the good thing is that we get to choose what to reflect.