> im
> > still dreaming of parallel metaverses interconnected via portals or
> > teleport. Where SL takes its role maybe as sotial life platform,
> > other virtual universes e.g. based upon Croquet or others show up as
they are needed. That sounds like a vision!
> >
> > Finally i dislike the idea to be member of an SL-group that thinks
> > about how to avoid SL. Isn't that a bit unfair? so we could meet without
placing a group.
> > maybe eventually that makes sense. But not before it becomes clear whats
up...

FWIW, I agree that the "big dream" of the metaverse is actually a web of
platforms with sensible, fluid portals between them so that content is
interconnected in useful ways. I doubt it is a matter of inventing one uber
platform to rule them all. Despite the many obvious flaws in Second Life,
Linden Lab has accomplished many great things with the Second Life platform
and their virtual world is currently at the frontlines of turning virtual
spaces into usable,practical everyday tools for people who aren't developers
or academics. The P2P architecture of Croquet makes it supremely attractive
to me as a developer and I would cite SL's direction toward open clients and
open servers as a stop-gap sort of solution to what needs to be genuinely
p2p to support the "big dream" that many people have for the multiverse.

So I'm not looking to avoid Second Life (I own a big chunk of mainland but
have no plans for an island until they open that up too and I can just set
it up on my servers). I just hope to bridge my SL-based content to other
platforms, especially something p2p like Croquet, so that I can inch closer
to the kinds of entertainment applications I want to be designing and
deploying.

Our SL group should acknowledge SL's leadership in this metaverse space but
should seek to extend beyond the boundaries inherent with SL. Some things
that Croquet may do better than SL:

-p2p world management decentralizes power, resources, and opportunities
better than any model that requires expensive remote servers (even if the
servers become/are "open source")

-higher quality avatar art and the ability to import 3D assets from
professional tools, more control over art import/export in general

-privacy: no central organization owns your chat logs

-access: totally free sdk (no need to sign up or create an account with a
controlling organization), no central TOS that can ban your account from the
entire metaverse system for any reason/no reason at all

-distributed ownership of users: each publisher of a world could easily
require a sign up or verification per application just as most users have to
create an account per web application rather than one big account for "the
internet" where none of the individual sites had access to the account info
held at "the internet db of users" which is the current system for
applications developed within SL (also for commercial apps "owning the
customer data" is very important so that you can do many important things,
such as ensuring due diligence in age verification or dealing effectively
with griefers)

-liberation from corporate whims: companies decide to break things or drop
backwards-compatibility goals whenever they feel like it. SL is obviously
not the only platform (or even the most notable) to do this but considering
that most SL developers are not making anything close to a profit from their
SL development... It's a ridiculous financial burden to have to fix things
when you were developing at a loss to begin with. Hopefully Croquet *in
future versions* will always maintain reasonable measures to run legacy
croquet code and to give advance warning/notice when something is going to
be depracated rather than having developers login and find a bunch of Ims
from customers saying "x doesn't work anymore" and having to drop everything
to rush in a fix. In general I hope that Croquet's birth as this open
developer-centric platform means that external devs are treated well and not
just as disposable value-adders for the central Croquet software.

Heh, you can tell from my final item that I think the main flaw with SL is
actually not one of architecture but of business policy. The developers and
content creators who make SL viable for end users are treated very shoddily
by SL decision-makers, imo (SL shipped as a fancy chat room, and what little
Linden content there is, it's not nearly as engaging as the user content).
Croquet is truly based on open development practices and I've been able to
watch a community working on the software, just as I have with other open
projects I follow like TikiWiki. That is the main reason why I think
developers should be looking at bridging SL to Croquet because Croquet might
give developers more opportunities to extend the platform and profit from
their contributions (by profit, I mean "pay people for their time so they
can make more stuff" because SL is a charity case for devs right now). And
for players, obviously they are going to benefit from a p2p world where they
can create their own island instead of paying insane set up fees and a
monthly rent that rivals most family's utility and grocery bills. It will
also be nice to have builds limited only by PC resources than arbitrarily
limited by "prim count" tied to blocks of virtual real estate. ;)

-Kelly