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- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
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Category: Making the Metaverse
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We spent last week wondering about Facebook/Meta not implementing best practices around virtual world harassment; this week, let's wonder how (and why!) they spent millions and millions of dollars on this Metaverse ad during the Superbowl. And I believe this counts as the first true Metaverse commercial to run during the year's most-watched event on…
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Update, 2/12: Bumped up for weekend conversation! With so many definitions of the Metaverse swirling around, and some even asserting that there is no agreed upon definition, I did something totally radical: Went back to Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash, found all the novel’s references to the Metaverse, and created a definition that’s based directly on those…
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If you've been following the news about Facebook/Meta's metaverse project lately, you'll recall the slew of bad press when a female user was sexually assaulted in Horizon Worlds, leading the company to hastily add an avatar "boundary" system. And if you've been following virtual world/metaverse development for any substantial amount of time, you've probably been…
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"Remember Second Life? That Could Be Facebook’s Future" is the title for my recent chat with Bloomberg's Parmy Olson (author of the seminal book, We Are Anonymous). Here's some of my favorite excerpts, along with some reference links where available: WJA: For any story I’ve seen about the metaverse now, there’s an analogue to what…
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Since Facebook/Meta announced its Q4 2021 earnings report today — the first quarter of the company operating under the new name Meta, with a stated direction of making the metaverse — let's take a look at its first attempt at launching a metaverse platform for a mass market. I'm talking of course about Horizon Worlds,…
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Here's what a Facebook veteran with deep knowledge of Horizons told me about the project last July, shortly after the company announced that making the Metaverse would be its main focus: "I think Facebook has the money and people to throw at the problem," as they put it to me, "but making 0-1 products as…
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Longtime virtual world analyst Nic Mitham just updated his new Metaverse Universe charts, referencing some of my New World Notes posts and other sources, with an emphasis on monthly active users in the leading immersive platforms. Above is just a sample of the platforms he's tracking. And while I might quibble with some of them,…
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From ROBLOX’s 2020 IPO stock filing This passage from my podcast with Philip Rosedale last week seriously deserves its own post — where Philip is talking about ROBLOX’s S1 stock filing, and a passage there (above) stating that 1,050 community developers earned over $10,000 USD a year from their ROBLOX content. By comparison, Philip notes…
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Wagner James Au · Philip Rosedale & Wagner James Au on the future of Second Life & the Metaverse UPDATE, January 21: Bumped up for weekend conversation! On the day when Philip Rosedale announced his return to Second Life and his plans to compete with Big Tech's "ad-driven behavior modification" would-be Metaverse projects, he and…
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Data via SimilarWeb ROBLOX enjoyed a breakthrough year in 2021, with a spectacular IPO last March and increasing talk that it's the leading metaverse platform, with growth to 43 million daily active users late last year. According to SimilarWeb, however, there's one thing ROBLOX didn't grow in 2021: Website visits. Since at least June 21,…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 