Today started with a keynote from Reuben Steiger from Millions of Us. There was an important message in it that I felt worth iterating in a single post rather than a mass roundup. That is one of not fixating on the difficulties, not to obsess about the tools in virtual worlds, but to think about people. Making work more interesting and dare I say fun for people is what we can do with virtual worlds. All of us in this industry know that this is work, but it is enjoyable work. Surely we can appeal to the masses by actually making their day to day drudgery better.
It may sound mad, dreamer talk but I do think that as virtual worlds and metaverses are primarily about people (usually the first slide of any pitch I do). Helping people feel better about what they do is a worthwhile investment. I think we have been doing that inside IBM, having 5,000 people gathered and focused on virtual worlds has been beneficial to the entire company and people want to be involved.
Monthly Archives: April 2008
Yes thats correct second life behind the firewall
As much of the press is out there now the VW 2008 announcement of Linden Labs and IBM working together to get an intranet portion of the Second Life grid running on our own blade servers and installed behind the firewall.
There is a lot to this and one key thing is that it is not the only thing we are doing still. Interoperability is still key, having various instances of virtual worlds and intergrating them to one another and to the enterprise are key. Services Oriented Architecture is the industry word for the pattern.
None the less it will be exciting to work out how to persists and share services across an internal Second Life grid and Active Worlds and IQ Metaverse and Forterra and OpenSimulator and …..
Likewise the flow of how we transition from being on an intranet grid to a public grid and back again.
There are lots of us here in NY from eightbar and IBM so please come and chat about this if you have concerns. If not then twitter, blogs etc happy to chat and explain.
I have to say its all good 🙂
‘Evolution of Games and Social Networks’ panel at VW08 – call for questions
I’ll be moderating a panel at Virtual Worlds 2008 on Friday, entitled ‘The Evolution of Games and Social Networks’. To give you an idea of what we’ll be talking about, the abstract for the panel describes it thus:
“With the planned introduction of Sony’s Home for the PlayStation3 and multiple virtual worlds providers now creating widgets for Facebook, Bebo, and other social
networks, we’re seeing virtual worlds reach out to every part of the Web and consumer life. This session offers a detailed understanding of how virtual worlds are taking advantage of these emerging distribution formats and how you can leverage Virtual Worlds Everywhere.”
I’ll be joined on the panel by some very smart and interesting people, including
- Christian Lassonde, President & Co Founder, Millions of Us
- Susan Panico, Senior Director, PLAYSTATION Network, Sony Computer Entertainment America
- Sean Ryan, CEO, Meez
(Mark Limber from Google was supposed to be joining us, but I understand that he won’t be able to make it.)
What would you like me to ask them?
The intersection between virtual worlds and social networking is a pretty big and (hopefully) interesting topic, and should be a well attended session. I’ve been preparing some discussion points and questions for the other panelists, and I’d love your input. If you won’t be there in person, here’s a chance to let me know where you’d like to see the discussion go. Specific questions for specific panelists or general topics for discussion are both welcomed. Leave a comment on this post. I’ll be posting the results after the event (audio? text? video? at least one of those anyway), so think of it as a way of participating remotely and asynchronously. Alternatively, think of it as a blatant lazyweb request to make my own life easier. 🙂