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Overview

Currently, SharedUniverse.net allows you and a group of like-minded people to create a free Group Blog. Successful blogs have new articles reasonably frequently. This can be difficult for a solitary blogger. A Group Blog is the perfect solution, allowing a group of people to all contribute.
  • Free Registration: Anyone may register for a Free account on this site. You and each of the people in your group should do this individually.
  • Group Creation and Membership: You can create a group on the site. Then each of the people you want to blog with can join the group you just created. Alternatively, you may decide to join one of the public blogging groups which already exist on the site.
  • Group Blogging: As each of you in the group submit blog entries, they show up on the group home page and in the group RSS feed. Anyone with an RSS reader can subscribe and follow the
  • Any Purpose: Your blog may be public or private for any lawful personal, non-profit, or commercial purpose (provided it does not threaten, harrass, or harm other users, subject to our Terms of Use statement).
  • Freedom: Do you like the features you see on SharedUniverse.net but you want to run the software yourself? No problem. This is part of the computing Freedom that we believe is every user's right. SharedUniverse.net is implemented with 100% Free Software. You only need to download the software and follow the instructions to install it.
The vision for SharedUniverse.net is much bigger than just Group Blogging. Our goal is to provide a complete, Free, Community-Supported Online Virtual World, extending the physical world in as many useful ways as possible.

Current Features

SharedUniverse.net hosts the SharedUniverse Software, an integrated set of Free Software components. This set of components is growing and evolving under the coordination of the SharedUniverse Project, with the goal of providing an ever improving feature set toward the ideal Virtual World solution. The SharedUniverse Project is in the early stages of its organization. Therefore, the features that are available are initially just the features provided by the Drupal platform on which it is built (as extended with a variety of extension modules).

Note: The features on this site are still being set up and are evolving rapidly. They may not yet function perfectly as they should. Please help us by reporting discrepancies between the actual features provided and what is documented here and elsewhere on the site.

  • Group Blogs - You and a group of people can write your own blog. The results are automatically available as an RSS feed. (We are working on making podcasts and videocasts easy.)

Future Features

The SharedUniverse Project is currently defining the features for and prioritizing the features for upcoming versions of this virtual world software.
  • Identity Services - SharedUniverse.net will be a free OpenID service. Furthermore, you will be able to control what information about your identity you share with whom.
  • Social Networking - Use familiar forms of social networking to build a space in which your friends can interact.
  • Web Presence - You and/or your group(s) can put as many pages of content up as you would like. This gives you a presence on the web with a simple WYSIWIG content management system.
  • Forums - Create a forum topic or join in the discussion of currently existing forum topics.
  • Polls - Create or participate in a poll.
  • Newsletters - Manage a mailing list and publish newsletters.
  • E-mail - Your identity should provide an email address forwarder with some level of filtering and spam protection.
  • 3D Virtual World - Avatar-based exploration, creation, and interaction in a 3D environment.
  • Multi-way Chat - Integration of all text IM networks on a web-based chat system. Includes support for multi-way chat. This concept extends to:
    • VNC/desktop-sharing,
    • audio chat,
    • video chat,
    • 3D avatar chat,
    • integration with the telephone system and SMS networks,
    • automatic transcript creation,
    • text-to-speech integration,
    • automatic real-time translation, etc.

Rationale

Most every feature of the SharedUniverse virtual world software is currently available in some form from other web sites. However there are two important factors that motivate the SharedUniverse Project.
  • Freedom - It is inevitable that people will come to depend increasingly on the virtual world to extend and increase productivity in the physical world. The more that you come to depend on your provider of virtual world services, the more you will value the freedom to switch providers or customize those services yourself. This can only be achieved when the provider of those services is motivated for your benefit rather than its own benefit and when the software it is built with are implemented with Free Software.
  • Integration - The value derived from virtual world services is increased with the integration of the various components. However, with non-free virtual world services, there is a limited ability to integrate them. (Wouldn't it be great to integrate Skype, Pidgin (IM), Facebook/LinkedIn, SecondLife, GoogleGroups, and YahooGroups services?) This creates a unique opportunity for Free Software solutions to provide a more powerful solution than any proprietary service provider can.