Facebook & virtual currency

 Posted by (Visited 10257 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
May 202009
 

I wrote a blog post about this yesterday, but alas, I lost it.  CNN has an article about Facebook’s virtual currency plans, which are already moving into alpha.

Facebook is researching the idea of creating a unified currency but is “very early” in the process and has not committed to it, the site said in a statement to CNN.

Currently, applications on the site — which allow users to play games with each other and trade gifts — are powered by currencies made by the application’s developers, not by Facebook.

These developers are making good money on the system, and Facebook is missing out on profits in that area, said Hudson, of the Virtual Goods Summit.

— ‘Virtual currencies’ power social networks, online games – CNN.com.

Now, Facebook already has a virtual currency — credits — which you use to buy gifts. But what is being talked about is opening up an API to their currency system through apps.

For those who haven’t noticed, the open APIs Facebook is creating are allowing access to data such as login from anywhere on the Net. So in effect, this could lead to a fairly standard currency fo any site that accepts Facebook logins.

The real play here, as Information Week notes, is to become a “gold standard” of sorts, similar to the way in which Facebook and LinkedIn are already becoming stronger standards for online identity than OpenID is (the flip side is, of course, than you can now use OpenId to log into Facebook!).

The notion of “customer ownership” starts getting very blurry in a world like this. It won’t be long until you see major MMORPGs allowing you to log in with social networking credentials rather than requiring you to create their own account (we at Metaplace already allow this). And if these currency plans move forward and go far enough, we could see many users just paying their subs or their microtransactions with Facebook credits.

For smaller apps and websites, this can make a great deal of sense. Lots of other players are trying to establish base virtual currencies that work across sites and apps.

Idea Exchange talk on Virtual Economies

 Posted by (Visited 5982 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
May 152009
 

I’ll be at this Idea Exchange event on Virtual Economies, which is happening cross-world in SL and Metaplace today at noon PDT (which is a bit over an hour from now). You can go straight to the Interval world with this link, and you can just log in with your Facebook or other credentials if you like.

On April 17th of this year, Alicia Ashby of Virtual Goods News wrote that based upon performance data released by Linden Lab and despite the current downturn in world economies, Second Life’s virtual economy appears to be growing. (The news was also picked up by CNet.)

In this second in a series of Idea Exchange events hosted by GSD&M Idea City, we will invite Alicia Ashby and several other virtual world industry insiders the likes of Raph Koster of Metaplace, Richard Acton-Maher of Linden Lab, Sibley Verbeck of Electric Sheep Company, Adrienne Haik of Metaversatility, Robert Bloomfield of Metanomics, and others to join us in an open discussion about the role that virtual economies will play within the context of our real-world economic recession.

Metaplace is now in open beta

 Posted by (Visited 9167 times)  Game talk, Gamemaking  Tagged with:
May 152009
 

Yesterday was a big milestone for me. Anyone can now go to Metaplace.com and register. You get a small world for free, with full access to all the content creation tools. Lately, I’ve been describing it at “the power of Second Life, with the ease of The Sims, on the web.”

It’s early days yet, of course. There is a lot more left to do. For example, we have not yet released the ability to embed worlds on websites and profile pages, which is a huge part of the story. There’s more to come in terms of web integration, plugins on the marketplace so that it gets easier and easier to make what you want, and so on. We’re not done by a long shot.

But it’s still exciting. As users create more content and share more, the power everyone has to create will rise dramatically — we’re making the classic bet on users and the network effect that has helped so many websites. I can’t wait to see what develops.

Here’s the welcome video, for those who have not seen it:

The perfect geek age?

 Posted by (Visited 57190 times)  Misc
May 142009
 

Was being born in 1971 the perfect time to be born a geek?

  • It meant I got to see Star Wars in the theater, 13 times, at ages 6 and 7, exactly when it would overwhelm my sense of wonder.
  • I got an 8-bit computer at exactly the age when boys get obsessive about details, and I spent days PEEKing and POKEing and typing in listings from magazines and learning how computers actually worked.
  • It meant at least half the new games I played were actually new ideas.
  • And yet I got to play real pinball machines.
  • In real arcades.
  • New Wave science fiction was the used paperbacks laying around, and I got to read cyberpunk and steampunk as they were invented, and see SF when fandom was not yet a media circus.
  • I got to play D&D from as close to the beginning as most anyone.
  • And feel like I had inside baseball knowledge during the D&D scene in E.T., which the other folks in the theater didn’t get.
  • I was there for when the X-Men were new and fresh
  • I got to high school when PCs were becoming ubiquitous.
  • I got to college when Macs were on Apple campuses, and actually useful.
  • And when you had no choice but to use libraries for research, so I actually learned what real research is.
  • And I was too young to feel cynical about Dead Poets Society.
  • I got onto the Internet after it was tiny, but before it was mass market. So I got to see and use most of the tools and software that were key to its evolution, as they were used, then replaced, then discarded. Pine, gopher, Usenet, Mozilla…
  • I read Sandman when the issues first came out.
  • I got into the games business before it was mass media, but got to ride the wave.
  • …and also got to see the Web unfold…
  • …and got Wikipedia and Google just in time for when I didn’t need to use libraries anymore…
  • …and see some of the science fiction coming true.

Looking back on it, it makes me feel a bit sorry for those born ten years later. And I can’t judge ten years earlier, but so much of that seemed to hit at the right age. Looking back at history, it seems like the last big waves of popular invention like this were decades ago. Teens with hot rods? Engineering in the 20s? I see my kids now, and they are so clearly getting the finished products of so much, not the products in the process of invention… Am I wrong?

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