Metaplace - MMOs and Virtual Worlds Made Easy?

It's slightly old news by now, but I just found out about Metaplace today, the project that Raph Koster and the rest of Areae has been working on all this time.

The website claims that you'll be able to explore these easily-created virtual worlds without having to download anything. I'm guessing what they mean is without having to download anything if you already have some existing clients installed. Unless it uses the Metaplace client that is, which it probably will for 3d stuff. But otherwise, the platform can piggy-back off of some existing client, which is great. That kind of accessibility will definitely give Metaplace some long term chances of succeeding.

I'm really excited to see where this project goes. At the very least, it's a cool thing to use for prototyping some online gameplay. However, if it was a decent platform, it could allow people to quickly make successful multiplayer games or generate cool online spaces. And it could bring in revenue, too.

If the performance and security is decent, it could be another alternative to SmartFox for a server-side solution to Flash multiplayer games.