Wagner over at GigaOm talks of a major defection from the world of traditional Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOs.) It bears some discussion.

Most MMOs involve software you install (a “fat client”) and a monthly subscription. They’re lucrative — Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is the big one, with an estimated 10 million players worldwide. There are others, like Everquest, Age of Conan, and Eve Online.

These MMOs need to keep adding content to retain users. Warcraft originally let players climb to level 60; then they added the Burning Crusade, which moved the level cap to 70. They’ll soon introduce a third patch which adds more content and takes the cap to 80. Each time, they sell new software and they change the game to make it easier to get to the higher levels, changing game dynamics.

As Wagner points out, the dynamics of the industry are changing. “Casual” MMOs like Runescape have a huge following, and start out free. They run in a browser, and they make their money wherever they can — through item purchases, advertising, and “premium” game models.

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My wife and I spend a lot of time online. The other day, I lent her my notebook for a few minutes mid-surf, and she quickly went over to Reddit. As it turns out, most of the links I’d opened were the ones she wanted to read anyway. Over at GigaOm, Om’s been reflecting on Facebook for some time now. And this got me thinking.

Surfing is increasingly a social activity. Think of news aggregators as questionnaires: “Which of these stories do you find most interesting?” If we are what we surf, then the people with whom we have the most in common are likely to have similar surfing patterns. This notion alone isn’t particularly revolutionary, and it’s driving innovation in fields like web analytics. But apply it to Facebook Connect, and it opens up a whole new realm of social networking.

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I wrote a piece a while back about how centralized computing makes a cloud a big target. I didn’t want to get into the biological origins of this stuff, but one commenter was right: Monoculture is a precursor to extinction.

In university (which seems a long, long time ago) I wrote my thesis on evolutionary theory and product life cycles. Admittedly, not a screamingly fun topic, but it did give me a chance to read up on the Burgess Shale and other such things.

Now comes word that Amazon’s EC2, by virtue of the independence it affords hosters, is being used by bad guys for nefarious misdeeds (thanks to Rachel Chalmers of The 451 for pointing it out.) This provides an additional risk: Many of the Internet’s defense mechanisms involve black-holing specific hosters when the sites they’re operating do bad things.

Of course, when you’re hosting many applications, having one of them get blacklisted can be a nuisance for all the others. What’s interesting is the back-pressure we’re seeing arise against the popularity of cloud computing: At Structure, we debated the fear of lock-in; Stacey has a great piece on enterprise obstacles to adoption; and here, we’re seeing the downside of on-demand, easy-access platforms.

In other words, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. And that doesn’t just apply to dinosaurs.

The folks from Embrase are working hard on an upcoming Startupcamp in Montreal. An impressive 27 companies have signed up already for the chance to pitch, meet, and learn. And startupcamp Montreal 1 had a total of 180 attendees.

Informal events like Barcamp and Startupcamp are great; they tend to bring together the strange and sublime alongside the polished and driven. I remember watching a scruffy developer show something, half-ashamed, apologizing for the UI and mumbling uncertainly. But what he’d built was astonishing. This kind of not-realizing-how-cool-it-is happens a lot.

I talked with organizer Phil Telio about the event. “We’re excited to have this combination of seasoned speakers, eager entrepreneurs, and startup veterans in one place,” he said. “The first event was a huge success and it’s a testament to the thriving Canadian startup community.”

I’m listed as a Guru for the event, which I think means I help judge the various pitches. Or it could be I drink too much of Montreal’s immensely-superior-to-Redbull energy drink.

Certainly, it’s become easier to build a prototype to impress. Scaling is less of an issue with on-demand components; most monitoring tools are free or near to it; transaction processing through Paypal or Google Checkout is a snap; and frameworks like Ruby and Flex make interfaces that don’t suck, even for non-designers.

The companies slated to present include:

• Vencorps, a part of powered by Cambrian House applying crowdsourcing to startups. Basically Project Greenlight incubator.
• Startyourtube, which looks like Ning-meets-Youtube. Curious to see how this is different from Youtube’s existing personalized sites.
• Camwii, a screen sharing service like Webex that reduces all the complexity of what’s being shared down to a sliding window. And I thought it was a new Nintendo gadget.
• Healthivate, which while still stealthy sounds like Healtheon-redux meets Google Health (reminds me of Marissa Mayer’s famous “I’m feeling Yucky button” joke.) Hope founder Yan Simard has read The New New Thing.
• Loyaltymatch, which seeks to unite people with excess loyalty points with those who want some. Bit of a gray market there, and many loyalty programmes put specific constraints on selling things (like flights) for money. But it’ll be interesting for another, macroeconomic reason: Claim rates on many loyalty programs are low (relying on consumer laziness and unattractive offers like restricted travel times) — disintermediating this with the Internet will change the economics of prizes and loyalty programs as claim rates climb.

Looking forward to hearing their stories, and to finding out more from the other attendees. I’m sure the guys from MTW will be there recording all the goings-on, too.

On Saturday, I hung out at Barcamp in Montreal. Basically show-and-tell for geeks, with everything from new applications to the doom of DRM to pretty much anything technically or culturally active.

One person asked me how I defined “nerd.” I suggested that it’s a person who gets significantly more enthusiastic about a specific subject than their cultural surroundings deems appropriate and resists a dampening of that enthusiasm, usually by denigrating the status quo.

Pretty much like a cult. Mea culpa.

It was a great event. Montrealtechwatch has some pictures and a synopsis. I had a very interesting discussion with the folks at Cakemail (helped greatly by input from Ian over at Syntenic.) Cakemail is a product of Montreal’s thecodekitchen startup, which I wound up writing about over on WebWorkerDaily.

At one point I got up and showed some Coradiant to the crowd to fill in a gap; a bit hectic, but the audience is so web-savvy they understood a lot of it right away.

For future Barcamps in Montreal, check out the Wiki. Evan, the organizer, tells me the next one will be a Canada-wide one held in Montreal in the early spring.

(I think my favourite time-waster was the Powerpoint Karaoke, in which victims participants get up and deliver a presentation they’ve never seen before. Very funny stuff, particularly when you’re reprising an RIAA slide deck to a room full of people who think a CD is what games come on.)

Free remote media service Webot (www.webot.com) recently released agents for Linux and MacOS, adding to existing Windows support.

This may not seem like such a big deal. But it’s a sign of a tectonic shift going on right now: From the closed, local desktop to the always-on, I-want-it-now world we’re going to live in soon.

I’ve been on the road for the past couple of weeks. And I’ve seen a lot of change.

• At Web2Summit, I saw Nokia’s launch of the N810 (about which I’ll be writing over at GigaOm shortly.) The N810 invites comparisons with Apple’s iPhone, but it’s a different beast. It’s an open, Linux-based platform that runs Flash and pretty much anything else.
• Then, a week later at Interop, everyone was talking virtualization and on-demand services. Nobody cared which machine their app was on, or where it was located. Turning up a server was a few keystrokes.
• Now Google’s announcing an open, federated alternative to Facebook’s Social Graph APIs. The war for the online operating system is playing out, with each mega-site offering its own platform for software development.

Platform independence is huge

Webot’s release means my media — pictures, music, and so on — is made whole, freed from the tyranny of multiple machines and myriad operating systems.

Okay, that part sounds a bit melodramatic. But the point here is that we’ve moved beyond locked-up devices with open services.

In fact, you can play Webot on an iPhone through Safari; Webot doesn’t care that you can’t install things on your iPhone. Right now, I’m sitting at home, listening to an obscure Orb remix from my machine at work, just as easily as I’d use a local player.

But I don’t use my local player any more: I just bookmark my remote player.

I don’t care where my music is.

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