OpenAvatarID

When I heard about Raph Koster [1] creating Areae I got excited. When I heard him talking about it I got more excited. Then, when I heard him talking about his more deep insights about the future of Virtual Worlds I got... scaried. No way a guy with such a vision would make such, in my point of view, mistakes. But he did: in the middle of awsome texts he would drop here and there something I wasn't liking. So, when I knew that Areae was announcing its product, I was extremely curious and yet afraid that it would come something I would not like. He announced Metaplace, and I got the feeling that, after all, he was doing well - heck - I badly want to try it. It was exactly I was looking for! Since it is in a closed beta stage, I can only but read everything I find about Metaplace, but today I got... disappointed. I'm not going to dig into that issue this time, since this isn't a post about Metaplace (I'll leave that to a later time), but some things he said that was just shocking to me. For instance, Metaverse's default client (the one they provide) communicates using telnet [2]. Hello? Communicating credentials and conversations via telnet from a Flash app (client side, you know?) to your servers? Have you never heard about encryption? Anyway, in the same day I posted about "one avatar to rule them all" [2], where I talked about companies like Linden Lab and IBM that believe that virtual worlds should be capable of accepting visits from other worlds' avatars, if they owners want, I read this interview to Raph Koster where he says that, among other companies, folks at Areae think that virtual worlds shouldn't be capable of accepting visits from other worlds' avatars.

Since there are so many arguments from one side and another, I just want to have a clue (tho' the data retrieved will not have revelance...) of how many people think one way or another...

So there's a poll: do you think that virtual worlds should be capable of accepting visits from other worlds' avatars if they choose so?

Please vote by following this link: http://www.polldaddy.com/p.asp?p=118953.


[1] - http://www.raphkoster.com

[2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telnet

[3] - http://mindboosternoori.blogspot.com/2007/10/one-avatar-to-rule-them-all.html

One Avatar to rule them all

Once upon a time I was thinking in replacing both Mamnuts' and Pytalker's auth scheme with OpenID (and subsequently, change the auth scheme in Selva and maybe in Portugal Virtual). One of the reasons I didn't do it was that I thought that something way bigger was going to happen soon: and all was sort of confirmed when HiPiHi aimed to establish standards for 3D Virtual Worlds, about what they said they're going to talk about in the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo.

Yesterday news came of yet another announcement to be made, in paralel, in the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo: IBM and Linden Lab joined together [1] to help defining a “a truly interoperable 3D Internet” by the means of creating a way for avatars to migrate from one world to another.

The thing is, lot's of news sources talked about one effort and then other, but when you take all the hype and buzzwords out of what's being said you just see one thing: both of them want to make one sort of "OpenID for Avatars" (which must have more info than just an username and a password, we're not talking here of using the same credencials to access your avatar in any VW, but using the same avatar in every VW), and maybe something else.

In conclusion, this is, allways, good news. Even if it's only a "OpenVirtualID", it is great. But let's first wait until the real news come out from those lucky attending to the Expo, and then we'll talk particularities... I'm quite afraid of having already two groups not working together while both aiming the same thing... Caos might arise.

[1] - http://tinyurl.com/2mdp2y