San Diego-based Metaplace, the online virtual world startup headed by game designer and online prognosticator Raph Koster, disclosed today that Metaplace creators can now embed their Flash-based worlds into blogs or on to web pages.
"Metaplace users can now add their virtual worlds to web pages with the same ease that they add a YouTube video," Koster said today. "This significant industry step breaks down the remaining barriers between virtual worlds and the rest of the web, allowing worlds to be easily accessed and shared anywhere."
Koster promoted a few sites which demonstrate the new embed option:
http://www.comicemporium.net/index.php
http://mp.tikitronics.com/mp2wp
http://3dsquared.ning.com/
http://grace.weebly.com/metaplace.html
"Today is a big day," Koster wrote on his blog today. "We've released a feature that I personally think is highly significant for both Metaplace and for virtual worlds in general....It's a small embed code, much like a YouTube video -- and in fact, it's smaller than a YouTube video in terms of download size."
The new feature the functionality of virtual worlds by allowing users to essentially copy and paste their Metaplace virtual world into a blog or web page.
Says the company: "Users will be able to showcase their creativity, promote and host virtual events, and share their art, games and products from their virtual world onto their existing web presence. Also, since Metaplace's user-created virtual worlds are Flash-based, visitors to the site can enter an embedded virtual world by simply clicking on it, as there is no need to download any software."
Of note to virtual worlds aficionados is an upcoming meet-up between Cory Ondrejka, former CTO of Linden Lab (the makers of Second Life) and Koster today at 2 p.m. PDT in Metaplace. Among the topics covered will be today's new embed feature. Conveniently, the discussion will be viewable via the new Metaplace embed functionality on the blogs of both speakers: Cory Ondrejka's blog as well as Koster's.
Said Koster on the new embed option: "There are some limitations yet, of course; you can do communication between the world and the web, but it's still a bit hard. There's no SNS apps just yet. And yes, you do need a Metaplace account at the moment. But as more use cases emerge and we get more virtual worlds splattered all over the Net, I expect we'll see these limitations fall away as we keep marching towards making virtual worlds a first-class citizen of the web."
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