Adam Martin has posted an interesting Article called “2010 and the Browser MMO” at his blog T-Machine, essentially raising the question, how a contemporary browser MMO should look and feel like:

“It’s 2010. I know a lot of people in the industry still haven’t accepted even the concept of a “browser-based” MMO, let alone realise where they’ve got to now…

For a look at today, go browse some of the Unity demos. Unity is *not* the “best” 3D engine, the fastest, the best language – but it’s nicely balanced towards ease of adoption. It’s very easy for new developers to get into. And so it’s setting a very achievable base standard that’s higher than many people would believe. With anyone able to produce 3D to this level, and embed it in the browser almost as an afterthought, the use of plugins becomes a new landscape…”

I would argue that this is an issue for every “serious” browser-game: probably 99% percent of all browser-games currently run on Flash, but Flash is not powerful enough to render graphics comparable to modern “professional” games — or even to 3D-environments like Unity. With the advent of new browser-plug-ins like Unity and others, the bar for good-looking browser-game-graphics is raised dramatically. The more people playing such 3D-games, or using services like Gaikai and OnLive during he next years, the higher the expectation will be how a “good-looking” browser-game should look like.

In my opinion, Adobe needs to react quickly to expand Flash’s capabilities soon. Hardware-acceleration, import of 3D-assets or some specialized Actionscript-libraries might be an idea. Otherwise, Flash-based games might soon be the equivalent of the Javascript- and applet-games of some 10 years ago.

Google reported cyber attacks to its network, originating from China and reportedly targeting email-accounts of Chinese human rights activists, as David Drummond, Google’s Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer writes:

“In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google…

…we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists… Only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.”

Drummond concludes that Google will react by not un-censoring all results on Google.cn from now on, which might even lead to shuttering their service in Mainland.

An impressive reaction — with only a minor flaw. Google never had a substantial footing in China; according to various sources its market penetration is around 30%, whereas Baidu — China’s largest search-engine has a share of over 90%. I am guessing that their revenue from Mainland is insubstantial. I don’t want to sound cynical, but it’s a convenient moment to push human rights if it doesn’t cost you anything. Google might even utilize this opportunity to exit the Mainland market without loosing their face before they fall flat like Facebook.