Re: [mmox] Creating walled gardens considered harmful

[Jon Watte <[e-mail]>]

Morgaine wrote:
> The above 3 things have to happen whatever the world architecture, 
> otherwise the real goal of interop /from the point of view of the 
> user/ has not been achieved:  *to create a mashup in which the user's 
> avatar is now in a new world setting and visible to new people*.
>

I agree, and if the OGP model was designed to solve those problems in an 
otherwise context-free manner, it might be a good starting point for a 
standard that many virtual worlds could adopt. But then, why define 
something new, when extending something like XRDS seems simpler and more 
straightforward, in the larger scope of existing standards re-use?

> Please be specific, post-BoF.
>

If you could articulate what you specifically mean by the statement 
"post-BoF" I believe I could adjust the discussion to match.
I don't believe any particular approach was decided in the meeting -- 
the biggest argument was one of "why don't we define what problem we're 
going to solve, for whom," but even that didn't get full consensus. If 
you believe the meeting actually decided on a specific course of action, 
I would be interested in reading about that.

Something I want to avoid is defining a standard that doesn't matter to 
most virtual world technologies.

For example, XMPP is a well-defined, open standard for IM-style text 
chat. However, the adoption and use of XMPP, even though Google Talk may 
use it, is still probably below 1% of the total IM market, compared to 
AIM, Yahoo and MSN (plus enterprise-specific solutions). I don't think a 
standard is a success until it is actually adopted and implemented by a 
majority of actors in the market, no matter how flexible, useful or open 
it is. Thus, I think concerns about the bang-for-buck for the potential 
implementors is crucial, because that drives adoption, which drives success.

Which leads us back to the problem that we very poor representation of 
many of the technologies in the market in this group. Personally, I have 
spent significant time analyzing many of the different technologies for 
commonality and differences (Darkstar, Croquet, Multiverse, Quake, 
Half-life, Unreal, EverQuest, WoW, etc). However, in the end, even if I 
formulate a proposal by synthesizing all of that analysis, I can't speak 
for any of the other actors, and if they don't care and don't adopt, 
then whatever standard is likely to be about as relevant as XMPP is to 
AIM, MSN and Yahoo. That would be bad.

Sincerely,

jw