15 Things You Should Know About vSide, The New 3D Facebook

It’s interesting to see the shifts in perspective happening. Right when many folks are discussing how to integrate more user created content into virtual worlds, we see being a closed environment praised because it makes for a more coherent experience. 🙂 And 11 hours /played and 78 minute average sessions are praised, when it’s tiny compared to most gaming worlds… but it IS huge compared to casual games. I wonder what the stats on that are for SNSes…

For those of you who have noticed the name Nabeel Hyatt popping up all over the place in the MMO-to-Web sort of space over the last year, well, now you know what he’s up to — along with some Turbine and Harmonix vets. 🙂 Conduit Labs, of which he is CEO, just announced landing $5.5m in Series A funding to do “social online entertainment”:

We want to deliver a completely new kind of massively multiplayer experience — one that requires minutes, not hours, to access and learn, and one that is as rich and social as real-world activities like shooting hoops or jamming in a band. And we wanted it all in a browser, as accessible as your email.

The Conduit Labs Blog has an informal take on how the company got going, and there’s coverage at 3pointD, at Read/Write Web, and of course at TechCrunch. Edit: Virtual Worlds News landed some interview tidbits.

Edit: two posts popped up with some more meaty detail. There’s Susan Wu’s post about why CRV funded Conduit, which discusses more the general space; and there’s a great interview of Nabeel at WorldsInMotion which digs deeper into what an actual product might look like.