Secondly, and this ties into the first, is your wisdom speaks from not just learning from YOUR mistakes, but from the mistakes of others. This is true wisdom, and you so eloquently spoke from it.

If those that would want to be successful in business would only understand that a community is built by its members, not THE company. And it is those members who will form there economies, the reason to come here (again and again) aka…the Long Tail “Destination Stickiness”. If they don’t it will become a ghost town, as the FREEWAY will bypass them.

From a historical perspective:

I lived through some really great and engaging Chat rooms, and IM, starting with ICQ, as an early adopter, (ICQ # 123563). Anyway, my point is, when a company completely controls your existence, as the old MSN chat rooms did, your communities were at the whims of MS, on whether or not your Chat Room stuck around. What typically would happen is the community broke down, most went separate ways. Hence, you now have the FREEWAY, interconnecting these communities (as you pointed out) because they know what works.

Then you have Second Life. A community always has a dark side, a person always has a dark side. This doesn’t make them bad, per se. What makes them bad BAD is if abuse is allowed or continues. Moralizing, because the FCC has been hammered by some puritans who live in isolated communities already, and the freeway passed them long ago, is an adoption of the minority and is always short lived.

The dilemma I see with 3D spaces, i.e.; places to go, etc…is that there needs to be a way to sustain the community based upon the members, not some web page geek, not ONE blogger, and not one SIM owner. This massive vision of the Internet also has a microcosm and those that would like to control you as a member are doomed, and its a cause to a breakdown in that community. So, we have to remain mindful not to allow anyone to control us as WE are the FREEWAY.

Again Gwyn, beyond excellant post, and you just gained a highly respecting you regular reader.

Your analysis is very sound. It is openness and inclusion that will survive and closed rooms that will fail. And for the reasons you suggested.

I also appreciate your focus on the business model as the predictor of future success or failure.

Too many these days have the “If we build it, they will come” mentality, not understanding that it is marketing and a sound income model that determine success regardless of how awesome your art and tech are.

Great work and analysis. Keep it up, we rely on you for finding out the latest in the 3D world. Thanks!

And yes, Ashcroft, it was our chat that definitely inspired me!… as well as one with Tara5 Oh from Ugotrade. We were both cursing and lamenting how the industry is basically moving away from immersive, contiguous virtual worlds to go to closed-room envirnoments..