Sounds like these Croquet chaps (they're English, right?) are a bit too immersed in their white papers and theory vs. getting out of their stuffy offices and into the real world of marketable applications. They really should team up with LL and work COLLABORATIVELY on combining SL and Croquet (and Active Worlds and There, etc)...
Gotta agree with you there, Eep. I've been keeping my eye on Croquet for awhile now.
What I don't understand is each time someone posts about it tons of people get all gushy and awestruck by their concept of portaling between "spaces" or "environments" set up by users.
That is Active Worlds in a nutshell.
I used to love checking out how people had built their portals into other worlds. Me myself, I always loved the starkness of just an open doorframe with a sign at the top telling where it leads. Sort of like those doors in Narnia and/or Dark Tower.
You can see through them, walk around them and everything, but when you step through you disappear - zowieee! and end up in a whole other world.
I wouldn't go back there for all the ice in Greenland, due to several issues I won't go into here, but I've always dreamed about the best of AW and the best of SL merging. Sprinkle a little Croquet fairy dust and I'm in pure heaven!
What I'm anticipating most is the system for which Second Life would just be an application. In theory at least it seems to make more sense to develop a game on a colloborative 3D platform rather than to develop such a platform on a game. But in practice, I suppose Linden Lab has got the ball rolling and just got millions more in investment. Who knows.