Grid Interoperability

Although it is not really news anymore, there has been an interesting development with the creation of standards and protocols for grid interoperability.
Previously, Linden Lab, IBM and OpenSim were working on this in the AWG, the Architecture Working Group. Now, they moved the development to the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force under the name of MMOX, chaired by IBM and LL:

"MMOX is an effort to collect best practices and develop consensus based standards for virtual world and MMO interoperability"
https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/mmox

From the draft MMOX charter :

"The objective of the MMOX working group is to provide an application-layer wire protocol for Virtual Worlds to a) enable interoperability between applications, b) provide for access and exchange with other systems on the internet such as web services, e-mail and other information storage systems, c) allow network layers to recognize VW traffic and make routing decisions based on its characteristics.`

The core work of the group will be the production of the Open Grid Protocol suite (OGP), a set of application protocols to communicate and interact with the state of Virtual World applications."

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Grid_Protocol
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/MMOX