The rumor about a Linden quitting, namely Cory Linden, was confirmed by a post at Massively titled Was Cory Linden fired, or did he quit?

Cory Linden, Cory Ondredjka in real life, helped designed major portions of Second Life which includes writing the scripting language. Massively also posted, based on an internal e-mail which they got a hold of, that differences in how Linden Labs should run was the root of the decision.

As a respond to the story, Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Labs, provided Massively with a statement, Philip Rosedale responds to Cory Ondrejka’s departure. Moments later, a response from Cory Linden was posted by Massively, Cory Ondrejka’s departure in his own words.

I finally received my invite to the Beta release of Vastpark but what is Vastpark?

VastPark is a virtual content platform that enables you to create and deploy your own 3D virtual world within minutes. Play with ideas, add physics, trial concepts and publish them online. You might not have used 3D before, but you can do this!

Status:

It’s in beta and you can start using the Creator tool by becoming a beta tester today. It’s free, easy to use and powerful. We will be releasing further software (including the Browser) before our stable release. Remember, this is beta software - if you require stable software, please wait until after our v0.9 stable release in December 2007!

You can compare Vastpark to Second Life where users are given the freedom to create their own virtual world limited only by your imagination and creativity. Visit Vastpark’s website to learn more about it.

While blog hopping, I stumbled upon Metaplace. A platform much like Second Life that allows you to create and build your own virtual world.

Metaplace is still in Alpha but you can apply as an Alpha Tester here.

So, what is Metaplace? I will let them answer that question for you.

Our motto is: build anything, play everything, from anywhere. Until now, virtual worlds have all worked like the closed online services from before the internet took off. They had custom clients talking to custom servers, and users couldn’t do much of anything to change their experience. We’re out to change all of that.

Metaplace is a next-generation virtual worlds platform designed to work the way the Web does. Instead of giant custom clients and huge downloads, Metaplace lets you play the same game on any platform that reads our open client standard. We supply a suite of tools so you can make worlds, and we host servers for you so that anyone can connect and play. And the client could be anywhere on the Web.

We hope there will be millions of worlds made with Metaplace. It could get hard to find stuff if we’re right, so the portal lets you easily search, rate, review, and tag worlds and games of all sorts. You also get a user profile so you can find each other.

If you have more questions then visit Metaplace’s website at www.metaplace.com!