….. to rule them all

Having just read a post on TechCrunch regarding the ‘new’ virtual world offering of HiPiHi(rumoured to be owned by the famous Anshe Chung), it appears that HiPiHi have announced that they wish to persue standardisation and interoperability between virtual world platforms(TechCrunch mentions ‘interact and transact’ as possibilities for interoperability)

Now, ask yourself, why would HiPiHi be eager to do this ? Well, to me i think this is rather simple.

The fact is SecondLife already has the market lead on this format of virtual world(fully user content created), any other company that comes along with their own platform, is going to have a seriously hard task ahead enticing players away from SecondLife’s environment to their almost zero value economy and almost zero level of content.

So, what’s the easiest route to the solution in this situation ? Well as is happening on HiPiHi’s part, claim you wish to make things work togethor, this way they almost bite into SecondLife’s economy and use it for themselves. There is nothing business friendly here, or with the intent of simply progressing to a global network of virtual world grids, this is simply a way to make themselves business compatible to the already market leader, in order to make their almost clone offering viable.

Now i think the really scarey/naive bit comes when HiPiHi are offering to create this standardisation of interoperability. This kind of alerts me to the possibility that HiPiHi are in the process(or at least hoping to be) of creating a standardized central assets server hub, to which any virtual world who wishes to be apart of the global network grids must be compatible with and connect to. OK technically it’s not a bad thing, and it’s one way to implement interoperability and compatibility, however, at a business level this so much sounds to me like HiPiHi are subtly trying to become the ‘one ring that rules them all’. Let’s face it, who ever controls/manages that central hub, has control over the every universe out there ! The naivity of this comes, i feel, on HiPiHi’s part. Do they *really* think LindenLab(owner of SecondLife) is about to hand that sort of power over to them ? Some how i think LindenLab will be intending on creating the standard, and controlling the centralisation themselves, and i think HiPiHi are having a serious laugh if they think otherwise !

Somehow i think if any one implements this interoperability/compatability open grid standardisation, it will be the market leader, SecondLife. Infact i have it on fairly good authority from a conversation with a Linden(a LindenLab employee) from around 18 months ago that this concept has already been thought of by LindenLab, and is refered to by them as being ‘gated’. Weather they have already started work on implementations of this and are keeping it secret is any one’s speculation.

Note: for those who haven’t seen this yet, why not check out an already operational open source open implmentation of SecondLife’s grid, DeepGrid, as well as a related product, an open source implementation of SecondLife’s sim server OpenSim

My favourite/preferred news site/channel, Sky News, have taken up residence in SecondLife :

http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,91200-1276113,00.html

Some how i think they’ve been ripped off on that virtual studio build though !    I’m actually surprised the sim it occupies is even still running with the amount of active scripts that are cleary there.    Watch the video and check out the number swirling script activity indicators !

Think i’ll be off to check that island out later today