Re: [mmox] OGP scalability concerns

["Hurliman, John" <[e-mail]>]

> we also use the term "domain" in it's more traditional sense to imply
> a bounds of authority. which is to say, we assume that all hosts and
> services inside a domain are administered by the same entity. that
> being said, there's no reason you can't have sub-domains, and there's
> no reason that two services associated with "the" agent domain can't
> be split across two administrative domains (like maybe yahoo or AOL
> get in the business of moving virtual world IM messages but don't want
> to deploy a world themselves.) it would require some coordination of
> identity management issues, but i'm sure they're tractable.

I understand this. If you are Linden Lab and you are already in the business of running lots of independent services (content hosting, identity storage and authorization, instant messaging, inventory servers, simulators, etc) then it makes sense to lump every service you want to provide under one trust domain. Simulation can be a different domain so third party simulators like OpenSim can run under a separate trust domain and optionally connect to the aggregate Linden Lab service cloud. Tada! You have OGP. It's a great business model. Unless you are any company *except* Linden Lab and you want to provide a service such as content hosting without becoming a full virtual world service provider.

Using the current evolution of the web as historical evidence and assuming that specialized service providers will be the norm, lumping together instant messaging and content hosting under the same umbrella doesn't make any sense. This is why I'm in favor of starting from the ground up and defining each use case and service endpoint, rather than trying to figure out clever ways of shoehorning the "right" approach into Linden Lab's OGP.

John