I just finished a book by Edward Castronova called Synthetic Worlds.

Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games by Edward Castronova Read more about this title...

It's about online games. It's one of the best books I've seen on the subject. There is only one thing I'd like to add, that I think Edward misses. Towards the end of the book is this quote:

"Early visionaries saw a single "metaverse" that is said to exist in parallel with our own universe; but we can already see that the synthetic world will resolve itself into a thousand islands, each separated from the next by many miles of ocean."

I'm not so sure. I think the minute we sit down in front of a computer we enter a virtual world. With the internet that virtual world became -- potentially -- social. Potentially social, but until recently, the social articulations were quite poor -- limited principally to discussion boards of one sort or another and one-to-one interactions of the IM and email kind. In the 90's, and for the majority of the population even today, the online virtual world they inhabit remains less social space and more reference space. Most people still surf the online virtual world as if they were alone, in an otherwise uninhabited information space, on the backs of search engines and home pages.

I believe the internet does express a metaverse that exists in parallel to our own universe, but that for a variety of reasons the primary means of exploring it is a dry, lonely, textual experience. The appearance of alternatives, currently in the form of games, blogs, tags, evolving web forums, and supported by technologies such as RSS, is a sign that internet-as-lifeless-reference-space is evolvuing into the internet-as-shared-social-space. Search, of course, will remain. In fact it's role will expand as it's capabilities increase; but that role will be in the background. The companies that get this are already leaders or are poised to lead.

The people were, are, and will remain, the only network that matters.