After hearing too much about the Metaverse in 2021 I wanted to write a few short thoughts of my own here at metaprose.online, and then I’ll see where this takes me, but I will try to keep each post reasonably focused and short. I’d also love to hear any feedback, although if you think crypto is the solution to all problems, this probably isn’t the blog for you.

I see the metaverse or web3 as an evolutionary step for the internet rather than a radical change, and while it will end up having a huge impact on our lives it won’t be an instant and transformative experience. You aren’t going to wake up one day and suddenly be in the Metaverse, you are going to live through the evolution of internet and it is going to keep changing and expanding how it interacts with your offline life. If having business meetings in VR is how we define success, then I’m really not sure what to do with this industry anymore and it seems like we’ve failed.

As a sweeping overview and the stepping off point for future articles I see this as 6 major areas that need to be transformed to provide value for both the end users and the companies that are suddenly jumping on this as the next big technology miracle. My background has me thinking about things first as infrastructure and secondly as user products, because I guarantee you that if it isn’t technically possible and at least theoretically profitable to provide you with a service only so many people are going to try to do it…

So the transformation will happen in 6 big areas:

• Identity - Who are you on the internet?

• Payment - Money makes the bits go round

• Ownership - Artificial scarcity and blockchains

• Features - This is where VC unicorns will be grazing

• Interface - VR/AR, but really cell phones and web browsers

• Content - Probably why you use it

Let’s keep that acronym as IPO-FIC, the kind of fiction you write as part of taking your metaverse company public.

Beyond these areas, I think it is worth thinking about the structure of the Metaverse in a very practical way, and how that will interact with users and governments around the world. Will this be a walled garden owned by one company, several conflicting walled gardens, a federation of metaverses or a chaos of multiverses (which is the collective noun for such things).

So what should we hope to see when all of this starts working? I’d very much like to see a more consistent and transparent experience for anyone using the internet, helping to reduce friction and break down the barriers between what you want to be doing, and what the technology is enabling you to do. If this works out it will enable transformative new technologies, but I think that even if we just open up more of what can already be done on the internet and make it easier to use that still provides an incredible value to the users of the internet. It also should provide the stepping off point for the new ideas that will keep changing how we think about getting things done online for the next decade. If you are hoping for improvements in equality or the behavior of humans online, then I’m much less optimistic.

And when should we expect to see the Metaverse be real, particularly if it isn’t something so simple as going to a work meeting in VR? My guess is 2027, so within this decade I would expect it to be clear that the experience of using the internet will be dramatically different along all 6 of those areas I listed above. It won’t be a sudden change, but if you look in the rear view mirror of your browser history, it should be pretty clear.