Re: [mmox] charter scope, thinking horizontally

[Morgaine <[e-mail]>]

Larry, I agree entirely with your suggestion that an early focus on
inter-world communications would be an easy win, and also with Charles'
followup which added further incremental wins.

This is why I am focussed so strongly on service decoupling.  When services
are hardwired within a world, they typically become ever more non-standard
and non-interoperable with every new world-specific feature that is added.

In contrast, when services are decoupled then the need for compatibility
with 3rd party services not only creates stability but also allows interop
to bloom without prior planning.  And while not a technical point, the
increased room for competition always helps growth in the area too.

Although OGP is only a threadbare framework at the moment, one of its major
selling points is service decoupling.  It has only decoupled two services at
this time, the agent identity service and world region service, so there is
a long way to go yet, but it's a start.

You have highlighted *communications* as another area that is an extremely
strong candidate for service decoupling, and in another thread we have been
discussing the need for a decoupled *asset storage
service<http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/mmox/current/msg01243.html>
* as well, given that one's inventory will comprise objects from an
arbitrary number of worlds and therefore should not be tied to an identity
provider.  Charles alluded to avatar and object presence in his points 3 and
4, and decoupling object/asset storage services would make those a lot
easier to achieve as well.

I hope that we can express our thoughts about early wins in terms of such
services, because the web provides a very strong precedent that we can
leverage in this area, and the large number of supporting frameworks for
services can facilitate progress immeasureably.


Morgaine.








On Sun, Mar 29, 2009 at 5:25 PM, Larry Masinter <[e-mail]> wrote:

> If you start horizontally, you might get significant value
> without having to overcome some really difficult problems
> of interaction between incompatible world models.
>
> Object interoperability is hard, because every world has
> a different model for objects, geography, movement, physics
> and so forth.
>
> Communication interoperability seems quite feasible:
> chat using extensions to XMPP/Jabber, voice using SIP,
> location using extensions to Geopriv, etc.
>
> I could see also agreeing on a form of GUIDs for object
> references and a way of discovering metadata about
> objects as well as content negotiation for object
> representations.
>
> It's interesting to think about world<->world communication
> as an extension of in-world <->  real-world communication,
> e.g., to google-talk to avatars using Jabber.
>
> Many people seem to have flickr/facebook/etc. identities
> for their avatars independently of the ones for their
> "real" selves, so this isn't too far-fetched a concept.
>
> Getting some success on inter-world communication,
> even if it is for a narrow application like "chat",
> will help enormously in establishing the credibility
> of any standards effort.
>
>
> (historical reference:
> http://larry.masinter.net/MOOGopher.pdf  )
>
> (IMHO caveat always applies)
>
> Larry
> --
> http://larry.masinter.net
>
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