Microsoft Explores Metaverse Development

Tara of UgoTrade has an enlightening interview with Zain Naboulsi, a Microsoft staffer informally known at Bill's company as “the guy for Virtual World Evangelism” (he's one of 4-5 folks at Microsoft with that  rough designation), experimenting with future development ideas in Second Life and two open source virtual world spin-offs, OpenSim and realXtend.  Among the highlights: Microsoft is focusing more attention on OpenSim than Second Life, and about 800 members of Microsoft's .Net and TechNet development community's are involved.  Zain thinks OpenSim's could be utilized as a "conference call center of the future", which will subsequently generate more interest from his company. "[T]hat’s where you start getting the budget and interest from internal Microsoft. I think that naturally leads to whole lot of Microsoft folks becoming much more heavily involved."  Read it all here.