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A relatively inexpensive media server aimed at Flash fronted audio and video applications with active support forums. Could be used for, say, audio spaces for browser based 3D spaces.
Web Spaces FTW!
I was asked to present a microtalk at the Metaverse Roadmap meeting today at Stanford and here are my slides and talk track. The slides are simple text because I'm going to project them from a virtual screen in a tomorrow space event hall with (network willing) other attendees milling around in avatar form so the audience will watch the milling not the slides.
I’m Trevor, I co-founded a startup called Transmutable which is building an online event hall rental system called Tomorrow Space. I also manage the Ogoglio project which is building an open platform for web based spaces.
The web devours data types and it especially relishes the ones which claim they’re too complex for little old browsers.
It’s eaten text, images, audio, video, geographical information systems, 2D virtual worlds, and now it’s on to 3D
In the next year or so we’ll see several launches which bring web based VWs into mainstream web use like YouTube did for video. We’ll also see the core technologies advance like Flash did for video underpinning YouTube.
Web VWs are:
* social
* accessible : 2+ major browsers, at least Windows and OS X
* spatial
* made from web tools: HTTP + HTML + Javascript + httpd
The metrics:
* size of communities: runescape 4-5M users, HabboHotel 15M users
* biggest of the fat clients: WoW 10M users
* desktop install base: IE+Firefox+Safari+Ajax, Flash = all desktop, Java = 5-10%
* cell phone browsers starting to not suck
Why fat clients:
* History - mostly game developers making games, painfully small machines and networks
* Size - Big worlds and eye candy focus leads to big files, slow downloads
* Control - immersion mantra, technology as business advantage, browser suck
And yet the web keeps eating media types. How does this happen?
Browsers provide a rich soup of media hung together by HTML and orchestrated by javascript. The stanford splash page has 25 separate files of 6 different types: html, css, js, gif, jpg, swf
With each new web data type there’s a few stages:
1. Click to launch established third party desktop app (e.g. Windows Media Player, Skype)
2. Embed desktop app as full page monolithic wadge (e.g. Flickr at launch)
3. Explode functionality into pieces hung together by HTML (e.g. Flickr today)
4. Send functionality into other sites via embeddable widgets (e.g. embedded YouTube video)
This year there will be too many announcements and launches to count, mostly be people in this room. Next year there will be many times more launches by people whom we've never met.
In the next couple of years we’ll see big niches filled:
* game niches (MMO to casual) filling/filled quickly
* corporate conferences
* live social events for asynchronous net communities like blogs, podcasters
* cell phone buddy spaces
* dress-up avatar apps
And we’ll talk about it all in tomorrow space event halls :-)
