METAPLACE the future of online RPG ?

... every Metaplace world process is also a web server.  It can issue both outgoing web requests of arbitrary type, and handle incoming web requests as well.
This means that any Metaplace world is capable of creating a web request from script, and then issuing that request to an arbitrary outside web service.  The game server provides useful API methods to easily parse the responses from these web service, including REST-like XML parsing and RSS.  You can also pull entire web pages and regex parse (string match) the response manually for more granular control if you wish.  Examples of this include issuing queries to outside SQL databases from an object in-game, pulling external real-time stock quotes into your world, getting the latest RSS news from CNN and feeding it to a town crier NPC chat bot, slurping real-time sports scores into your in-game sports bar, pulling YouTube videos into a wall in your apartment, etc.  This also means that objects and scripts in your world can transmit outgoing data such as badges, in-game events, or game scores to an external database or web service.  This allows for a nearly limitless extension of game functionality out across the internet.
Additionally, because every Metaplace world is also an embedded web server, external services can make requests of the game process through a simple CGI-like interface.  This means that an external webpage could call into the server process and access real-time data on individual objects currently in the world.  It is also possible to issue events through the game simulation using this interface, meaning that you could spawn a monster in-game when someone clicks on a webpage link, for example...