Charles River Ventures is a firm with keen eyes on the virtual worlds, social gaming and social networking spaces -- in particular, with an eye on entrepreneurs seeking to bridge gaps and coordinate elements from all of these kinds of ventures into a single integrated product. One such company in which CRV has invested is Raph Koster's Areae, and successful real-time networking tool Twitter is another. Worlds in Motion recently spoke with Nabeel Hyatt on his Conduit Labs project, the latest startup to receive CRV's vote of confidence. We chatted with CRV's Susan Wu, who focuses specifically on working with these products (she also was special advisor to the first Virtual Goods Summit), and got further comment from her on bridging the gaps in the space that Hyatt mentioned earlier.

"The distinction between what Facebook and an MMO looks like is going to disappear," Wu says. "All social interaction online will be driven by game mechanics. My goal in doing these conferences and blogging about this subject and trying to find companies to invest in is, how do I bring these two segregated universes together? There are all these Web 2.0 conferences, and Web entrepreneurs basically talking amongst themselves in this insular environment, and I see the same thing in the gaming industry, which has always been a cottage industry and very segregated. I see so many different parallels going on in these two communities, and my goal is to bring them more closely together."

Wu elaborated on where these two key industries are failing to connect. "There're a lot of virtual gifting apps and lightweight casual games developing on Facebook. And I spoke with a lot of these Facebook developers and they're all trying to reinvent the virtual economy," she explains. "And there’s a limitless body of empirical data out there – it doesn’t make sense for Web 2.0 folks to invent it from scratch. It results in an inferior customer experience. There’s been virtual economies and mass market since Ultima Online; that’s 12 years of learning that these guys just aren’t picking up on. That sort of frustrates me."

So she zeroes in on those ventures she feels "get it." "I try to bridge this gap -- Raph gets it, and Conduit does too—I've seen 100 or so startups in the space in the last year or so, and as Nabeel said, there’s such a dichotomy in the two communities, and there are very few teams that have been able to merge both disciplines in immersive gaming environments."

How to start bringing these teams from different sides of the field together? "When I put together the Virtual Goods Summit, it would have been easy to populate all of the speakers and attendees from the gaming industry," she recalls. "There's a lot of established success in virtual goods there. But I made sure there was a panel around mainstream virtual gifting -- companies like SixApart and Dogster and all of the folks who are experimenting with virtual goods, and I wanted to put them in an environment with folks from places like Neopets and Nexon so they could have a real dialog about what's going on on both sides of the fence."

She continues: "One of the hallmarks of a successful Web company is -- if you look at the track record of the most successful companies that have stayed independent and sustainable, like eBay, Google or Amazon -- they have built platforms [which can] foster entrepreneurs. There are ecosystems that spawn innovation from the community members themselves, and Facebook is falling in with that too, with the new platform launch. Few gaming people understand this intuitively -- though, Xbox Live Arcade really fosters an entrepreneurial ecosystem, too. That's something Areae is trying to focus on – how to build an actual ecosystem and a real web platform for people to work in."

Wu elaborates further on the Conduit and Twitter investments on her blog, reality.org.