Okay, the straight-up news: An Australian company called Yoick is in the process of creating a peer-to-peer (P2P), user-generated world(s) called Outback Online. You can read the initial story here, and here is Yoick's website, where you can sign up for updates.

Okay, now to my unabashed incredulity. P2P shared world? Really? How would ... I can't ... Seriously? I've tried P2P file sharing, and my compy slows to a crawl. That's without any kind of interaction with another user whose computer will likely be experiencing the same kind of problems. This made me giggle: "Second Life has a low-res look to it whereas sometimes I just stand there in the rain and watch the sun go down in World of Warcraft because it is so beautiful," he says. "Our stuff is rich, 3-D and graphically more like something you'd see in World of Warcraft." Uh huh. It looks really nice on your optimized systems, I'm sure, running on your network of computers mere feet away from each other, on your trusted intranet.

If there's something I'm missing here, O Those in the Know, where this is actually something possible, please enlighten me. Until then, I'll scoff away.

(Via theage.com.au)