Someday... a galaxy of metaverses

Most NPIRL'ers have a great deal invested in Second Life, be it in ongoing business concerns, acquired land, or inventories bursting with creations. While we all deplore the instability of the grid, we do keep a watchful eye for information regarding legitimate competitors to SL who might have the potential to render our virtual assets valueless... or perhaps improve our second lives.

There’s the new HIPiHi, now in commercial release... Wagner James Au (aka Hamlet Au of New World Notes), was just in China and met with Xui Hui, founder and CEO of the 16,000 member or so start-up.

IMHO, no matter how good the grid, content, what-have-you may get, of this and the just-around-the-corner English and Japanese language versions, the western world is not likely to embrace the politically censored environment of HIPiHi.

And then there is the happy talk of interoperability between Second Life and other metaverses… ^.^

So... it was with interest that we read the Sept. 6th article in Reuters about DeepGrid: "Rival grids threaten Linden’s monopoly on SL technology."

Adam Frisby (SL's Adam Zaius) confirmed via IM yesterday that while he may not be the fearless leader of DeepGrid, he has indeed teamed up with a dozen other independent developers to work on it. He added that DeepGrid is one of many grids that have joined the tumble, but pointed out that what we really should be looking at is OpenSim, a project to develop an Open Source Simulator.

Adam also said that OpenSim is still a good 18 months out from being competitive, and by then – he hopes – LL should have an open grid that DeepGrid can connect to.