Metaplace is coming Spring 2008
There have been numerous battle cries against the beleaguered Second Life, most recently from Kaneva, but so far nobody has replaced Second Life. There really hasn’t been anything comparable.
Metaplace sounds close. It’s the brainchild of Raph Koster’s San Diego-based startup, Areae currently in limited alpha testing. It won’t be in open beta until Spring 2008.
An intriguing, detailed post on Gigaom explains:
Metaplace … is “A Web browser with virtual world capability.” And it’s a browser that comes with its own tool kit, for people who want to build worlds, and a community/marketplace where developers can give away or sell their templates, scripts, and so on, hosted on the Areae network.
The idea of not having to download and run a program to experience the virtual world is appealing. I’ve noticed an uptick in web-based MMO since our group started this blog. The ability to run Metaverse on a mobile phone (iPhone?), PDA, gaming, music and other portable devices is attractive to both developers and gamers.
Scaling, oh yeah
Scalability is the reason this writer is most looking for some real competition for Second Life. Something web-based should be better suited to handle scaling issues than a setups like SL.
Speaking of scaling and competition. One of the alleged SL competitors to watch, Outback Online which claims to be able to support 10,000 avatars on a single server is still MIA.
Developers
For developer readers, Metaplace is using the Lua programming language.
September 19th, 2007 • 
TD Goodliffe • 
comment | September 19, 2007 at 15:47 | individual comment-link
I’m a bit confused as to why you think that merely being web-based releases a service from scaling issues.
…Or did you never notice Microsoft server outages, Warcraft forum crashes, or play any of the virtual pet games…
Just because some web servers can scale does not lead to the conclusion that all services run on the web can scale.
comment | September 20, 2007 at 07:17 | individual comment-link
Crissa - please go back through the post and show me where I said “all services run on the web can scale.” I don’t like it when words are substituted for what was actually said:
“Something web-based should be better suited to handle scaling issues than a setups like SL.”
Should be is not “all services … can scale”
Of course scaling of any individual project will depend on backend hosting, coding, resources, but I think it’s easily proven that a one to many experience on the internet (especially using scaled resources like S3) is a more scalable architecture than current virtual world experiences with places like There and Second Life.
I mean really, does anybody have to challenge this when you can get, what, 40 people or so on a single server in SL? Compare that to even a very poorly coded MMORPG website like say Duels (see my past post) and the two aren’t in the same league.
As for Microsoft buckling? They didn’t do it under the strain of 75 simultaneous visitors, that is for certain.
I was careful in the piece not to crown something unseen as any sort of SL killer, but I think a web-based architecture is much more sound and more viral than SL ever will be with the current server limitations.
If Linden would get off their butts and open source the server I’m sure we’d see improvement over the avatar in sim/server limitation, but even in an optimal circumstance I don’t see that overtaking a fine-tuned web-based scenario.
Never say never though
comment | September 20, 2007 at 07:19 | individual comment-link
I’ll say never. Linden will NEVER get their scaling to the point of WoW scale. :p BOOYAH.