Metaplace

Raph Koster is one of the forefathers of MMO games. He did a lot of his early work on Ultima Online which was really the first MMORPG. His company, Areae, has been working on a secret project for over a year, and they finally unveiled it today - Metaplace. The concept of Metaplace is to be a game development environment to make online, community-based games without doing everything from scratch. As an example, they mention that one of their employees built a game in a day and a half and put it on his MySpace profile to be played by anyone. So far, it's exciting to think about the possibilities, but I really want to see what the real meat is once things calm down. Their website is down from too much traffic right now.