I was contacted earlier this week by Stewart Butterfield, the visionary behind Ludicorp and that start-up's massively parallel role-playing game-in-progress, The Game Neverending.

Over the next few months, Ludicorp will be actually rolling out the gameplaying part of the Game. In the meantime, he has enlisted a seemingly fanatical group of beta testers who are working hard to smooth out the communication infrastructure for the complex and highly social (and neverending) game that Stewart and company envision. The idea is a complete social world, with individuals wandering around encountering other folks, bumping into objects, buying land, setting up businesses, forming cults, making war. (Reminds me in some ways of the virtual world in the Neal Stephenson book, Snowcrash).

To support this intensely social scene, Ludicorp has developed a few interesting concept around instant messaging.

He has defined two sorts of social groups: Circles and Orgs. Circles are egalitarian, and all members has similar rights and controls. Orgs are more like hierachical organizations, with those higher on the totem pole limiting or directing the choices and rights of those subordinate to them, like military or religious groups.

But for both sorts of groups, the Game supports group presence: associated with the group information is an icon that presents a 'completion bar' icon -- like the one used for installing software -- that indicates the number of online group members relative to the overall number. Stewart plans for a variety of more complex sorts of presence -- indication of group status ("voting" or "working independently") or goals ("Looking for allies" or "trying to sell copper") for example.

I am very taken with group presence and its possibilities in the business context: business process status ("awaiting signoff from Bill") and project status ("90% completed"), as only two basic examples, could be transmitted through group-oriented buddy lists in an economical, concise, visible, and real-time fashion.

I was also intrigued that the system supports a scalar approach to degree of relatedness, including acquiantance, friend, close friend, soulmate (they are changing that name), and enemy. I think all social systems need a way to designate enemies.

My personal interests are not the game itself, per se, but the constructs that Stewart and company are developing to support rich, real-time interaction for online communities. I'm sure there will be lots to learn from watching what happens at The Neverending Game.