The cool thing that excites me about metaplace, is we’ll be seeing worlds for communities to just hang out in. Instead of just a forum or whatever attached to a webcomics, news sites, or blogs, we’ll be able to hang out in little worlds attached to existing communities. I think people will be surprised at just how awesome the games and worlds that people will fork, iterate, fork, merge, borrow, will become.
There’ll be people dedicated to making mmo templates that are specifically designed for being borrowed by website communities.
As an example, it’s pretty inevitable that Penny Arcade will be forced to make one filled with Gabe’s art. I think they even mentioned that in a post once.
Currently MMO’s usually need to create communities from scratch. Web 2 has given us extremely deep and numerous social networks in many different forms. It’s a huge market really. I think metaplace will succeed because it is trying to fit in snugly along side the current web concepts. It will complement existing frameworks and communities, not try to take advantage of them. I think it’s more of a tool than a gaming space.
Think of building a site.. Hmm now we need a blog, we need forum, we need a flickr page, we need a metaplace. If it works it wont be the only option, others will eventually compete, but it will definitely be the first.