Defining the metaverse

Ever since Facebook decided to chart a new future toward the metaverse, even changing its name to mark the shift, the term has become ubiquitous. Myriad startups and public companies are slathering themselves with the term in hopes of catching the wave.

I have no real beef with companies tuning their marketing for the current moment. What I do struggle with is just what the metaverse is. For example, back in January this newsletter said the following:

The most fun that I had this week was a visit to Decentraland. In short, I was in edit and trying to distract myself so that I wouldn’t bother the editing team while they worked, so I fired up the social-crypto environment – metaverse, in other words – and went for a tour. Rocking a mohawk and some pretty cool pants I managed to get lost, visit an NFT gallery, and fail to gain access to an arena.

Is the metaverse a social-crypto environment, bringing together human interaction and decentralized ledgers? Perhaps that’s part of it, but it doesn’t feel sufficiently complete a definition.

… link to full length article on TechCrunch.