Anticipating more antagonism I was about to say: “Which is more interesting and valuable – students building a project website that only the class and their teacher can see, or students working with other students from the other side of the globe to build a project website that the whole world can see?” but I see we are on the same page. 🙂

Maybe I didn’t express myself well, but a distributed World Wide Grid (hey! did I just coin a term?) is exactly what I am hoping to see evolve. I’m all for moving away from walled gardens.

I was just pointing out the advantage of having the numbers.

And this is an advantage Linden Lab are hoping to exploit when they open source the servers. They are hoping that Second Life will be so big, and that so many organisations will have invested so much time and money in there, that people will be willing to pay to connect their own servers to the SL grid and the economy.

Personally I think they are kidding themselves. As soon as they open source the server software competing hosting services will emerge, protocols for connecting sims into a global grid will emerge and SL will go the way of Compuserve and AOL.

I think Philip Rosedale’s vision is a brilliant one, and I admire how far they have brought us to date, but I say “No” to LL dominating the metaverse.