Yes, this is absolutely correct.

A "metaverse" exists in contrast to meatspace. In meatspace I walk down the street, I look through a shop window, I see you browsing inside, I spray some graffiti on the wall, you see the graffiti when you come out of the shop. We have a shared space with the qualities of presence (I passively saw you while you were browsing) and persistence (the graffiti will be there for anyone to see).

In the metaverse, I open some application on a computer, I look at some window or readout, I see that you're online (maybe I just see a light next to a username, or maybe I see your WoW character dancing shirtless outside of Goldshire), I leave something persistent (maybe a comment on a blog post, maybe a spray on the wall in an MMOFPS), which is available for you to see at some point. There are hundreds of metaverses (that's nearly the whole point; a metaverse is a virtual space that isn't bound by the rules and limits of physical space, so why not inhabit a few dozen?) of varying complexity (many websites, IRC, BBSes) and immersiveness (Minecraft, Second Life, PlayStation Home). VR isn't intrinsic to the idea of a metaverse, it's just one potential realization of the idea.

> Metaverse comes from Snowcrash, and there it was... very unquestionably a VR experience as far as I can remember?

Stephenson depicted his metaverse as a virtual space for the sake of the reader's imagination, so that they could envision something real and familiar instead of just a bunch of people clacking away on keyboards. The "virtual street" metaphor used in Snow Crash was always just a convenient literary device, and not at all the point of the metaverse, which to reiterate is the idea of a virtual shared universe in which to exist that is unbound from the restrictions of the physical universe.

Its been around for longer than Second Life in pancake kvm forms but the latest iteration is based on Immersion or Embodied experience facilitated by the new hardware price/performance advances.

VR hardware is just about over the chasm and proper wide fov AR is on the horizon although semi AR/MR is possible today (e.g. Pokemon Go as a shared overlay of digital world space on to a shared real world space).

The Immersive Embodied Metaverse is available over the internet using open W3C WebXR standards today and this will get better as the space and infrastructure matures.

Virtual shopping malls where you would "walk" around by clicking around websites.

It’s clear from Facebook’s presentations for instance that they consider text messaging via WhatsApp to class as part of the metaverse.

It’s not anything new, but I think the metaverse strategy is basically Facebook saying “we want to own all communications, and push the boundaries of what owning communications even means”. That’s my take anyway, but I have found most people are focused on the VR aspect and have missed the more scary all-encompassing and broader definition.

So think that every user is an inhabitant, a citizen, a potential buyer in the virtual and the real world, but also a potential business owner in the virtual world. Business owners will be tax payers that must pay fees to operate on this city-state that will have internal laws that except for few cases (at most) will not be subject to government laws and constitutional protection, and if you are difficult or problematic the authority will be able to expatriate you without prior notice, regardless of time or money invested in the platform. Maybe, at most, they could offer arbitration with a company that knows that if they don't favor Meta the contract will not be renewed. So yeah. It is a good idea, if they can pull it.

There was a two dimensional interface called Flatland that worked like a CLI. Hiro used it to manipulate the virus without viewing it.