Gentle reader,
today I want to talk a little about the realXtend project which came upon my radar recently and impressed me great lengths. Their goal is, put in simple terms, to develop the InterGrid about which Gwyneth Llewellyn spoke recently in one…

>he gave the impression that creating a controlled environment for marketing is the number one priority of There.com.

I don’t have a problem with that. In fact, every single virtual world supplier needs to think of that. It’s just that they need to have different niche markets. Perhaps your favourite Bozos in Paradise sort of comfort level for advertising is an advert that tells you about a new i-Phone widget, or tells you about an interesting conference coming up, or whatever. You associate advertising with something grubby like toothpaste or jeans, but you want it if you can dress it up and take it out as “news I can use in my metaversal career”. So it just means a different marketer for a different audience.

It’s also the case that the future of the metaverse, whether we like it or not, lies with those who can fund their technological development through mass culture that the masses can easily access, and that means you will turn up your nose at it, but they will win. That’s why Mattel or MTV are the keynote speakers at a big VW industry conference with people with budgets of millions to spend and not, oh, you or me. The metaverse is not going to be about free-trade organic coffee, Ugo.

I also think it’s completely and utterly premature to say OpenSim has somehow opensourced SL and now it’s free and productive and going on its merry way. It isn’t at all finished and doesn’t at all have any assurance of creating the kind of customer list and internal coherent economy that Second Life has.

What good is it to extend the ability of avatars to walk between worlds if they are merely going to be visiting a lot of empty Mars space stations and tag sales with resold copied content from other worlds?