Yesterday, Stefan wrote down his thoughts on Linden Lab’s troubles. I loved that post, he’s right on. Let me add to that by stating the importance of the work that many of the laid off Lindens did, and the role of OpenSimulator from here on, at the technological level and beyond.
Things are moving into 3D, including the Web. I’ve been very excited with everything that is going on with WebGL. Sure, WebGL is still not good enough to render very rich scenes like those we find in highly immersive games, especially when the scenes aren’t optimized, such as the case with user-generated 3D content. But I have very little doubt that the needed optimizations will happen, and that soon we will have immersion on the web browser. It’s already happening. People want it, Google wants, it will happen.
So, let’s fast forward to the time when the Web browser can render rich 3D scenes, which, at the rate that the Google people and the Unity3D people are going at it, it probably is only a couple of years away.