Community Spaces in Atmosphere (official post)
Michael Kaplan
As many of you have heard, we at Adobe want to shut down any worlds that we host that contain active chat and community. There are a number of reasons for this, the main one being that we do not want Adobe to be viewed as a "destination", but simply as what we are, a provider of the Atmosphere Platform (Player and Collaboration Server), and tools for creating content for that platform. If Adobe continues to host community enabled worlds then people, especially first time visitors to those worlds, get the mistaken impression that Adobe is trying to provide places where people can meet and socialize. In terms of these types of places, we are trying to provide the tools so that others can create their own places for community, not be the focal point for community ourselves.
Since many people have been concerned with this in the past, I want to make it abundantly clear that Adobe is not intending to take down the publicly available Collaboration Server (many of you refer to it as the "Chat Server") at this time. There are no current plans to shut down Adobe's Atmosphere Collaboration Server, or to restrict access to it in any way.
What we do intend to do, however, is take offline all Adobe worlds that currently have chat and collaboration enabled in them. You may have already noticed that our updated site (www.adobe.com/products/atmosphere) no longer refers to any worlds that are collaboration enabled. However, the old chat worlds are still up and being used (HomeWorld, etc.). We will soon take these down.
What this means is that chat worlds can still exist, just that Adobe will not host them. We will continue at this time to host the Collaboration Server that people can freely use to chat enable their own worlds, but we will not host the worlds themselves (the HTTP or web files). Anyone with web space can continue to create a world, and chat enable it by pointing it at the Adobe Collaboration Server. That has always been the plan, we are now implemented it more fully.
In order to make it easier for people to find each other, and to recognize the efforts of our users and developers who are interested in chat and community, we will be adding a "Showcase Featured Site" link from our main product page which links to a "Featured Community Site". Much like our current "Featured Showcase Site", this link will change from month to month, highlighting the best and most interesting community sites created by the Atmosphere developer community (you!). We will look at submissions for Featured Community Site, pick the good ones, and feature them on the Adobe Atmosphere product pages. This should not only attract chatters, but will also give recognition to developers.
In addition, we will continue to host a "public stats page" which will show the currently active public chat enabled worlds, so people can find out what public sites are currently active and join them. We intend to enhance this page over time and will also try to make it more reliable over time.
Those with community sites that would like to submit them may worry that the load on their web server will be too high should we feature them. There are two reasons why this should not be a problem. First, even if you host the world on your own web server, remember that Atmosphere caches content locally at the Player, so that it should only be fetched the first time someone enters your world. All chat and collaboration messaging is done through the Adobe Collaboration Server, and will not affect your web site. Second, for those who continue to be concerned with this, the Atmospherians site has agreed to host the featured community site on their web servers.
So, we will let you know soon when the first link will be up on the Adobe web site, and soon after that, Adobe sponsored chat worlds will go away. For those who would like to submit their sites now for consideration, please post them in the forum here as responses to this topic.
Jim Coe
"LadyBunny's Trivia World II" at:
<http://wellmadewebs.com//public/atmo/tests/simple/simple-chat.html>
A small, minimal and fast-loading chat world.
Currently working on a new look to go with the new player (what with lighting, glare and physics being a bit different now), but the old version still works.
Thanks
dghartling
San Francisco Rock Chat
<http://www.thechocolatefactory.org/worlds/rockchat/rockchat.htm>
Chocolate Factory:In Concert
<http://www.thechocolatefactory.org/worlds/revoworld/revoworld.htm>
Two musical community worlds.
Laurence Tux
-------------------------------------------
just a bit of doc bug but the public server is WHERE and the stas page is Where and then
a gospel tutorial on the /ctl files is ...
Martin Judd
http://www.a1media.co.uk/Atmosphere/Pub/index.html
It's a tried and tested community chat world.
"Michael Kaplan" <mka...@adobe.com> wrote in message
news:1de99...@WebX.la2eafNXanI...
Rolu
delete as much as possible of it in your own message as it clogs up the web
interface view otherwise.
Rolu
Rolu
news:1de99...@WebX.la2eafNXanI...
> In addition, we will continue to host a "public stats page" ... enhance
this page over time and will also try to make it more reliable over time.
> -------------------------------------------
> just a bit of doc bug but the public server is WHERE
>
yacp://atmosphere.adobe.com
> and the stas page is Where
>
http://atmosphere.adobe.com/stats/statsp.pl
> and then
> a gospel tutorial on the /ctl files is ...
>
hm,
http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:7TYQ-uIrpn4J:www.atmospherians.com/at_archive/events/2002/03/commands.html&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
(that's Google's cache entry of the page, the page itself seems to be
unavailable at the moment)
Rolu
Donza
<http://www.donzas.com/seraglio.html>
&
<http://www.donzas.com/trivialite.html>
:~D