Update (again): You can restart the server by calling following address:
http://tooldev.de/ld/30/restart.php
Use this if you see a gray screen. It's far from an ideal solution, but it's better than before.

Update (deprecated): The server is too unstable and automatic restarting does not solve the problem, so please don't waste your time trying to play this game.

Shared World is a world, populated by animals and villagers. Every player gets the same world and can see (and change) what other players built.
The world is completely randomly generated and consists out of water (oceans, lakes), beaches, grassland (green), savanna/forests/highlands (I haven't decided which, so it's up to you) in a different green and mountains (gray). Mountains are currently rare.
Animals are the moving rectangles, there are plant-eaters (green/blueish) and meat-eaters (red), when hovering an animal with the mouse you can see what it is currently doing.
You can build buildings (change the type with the button on the bottom) by drawing a rectangle in the world. They appear light at first because a villager needs to build them to become darker.
When you build a center villagers will appear there. They choose their work themselves. If you build a storage, they will store whatever the got there. Villagers are the circles, each population has its own color (with a dark and a light variant).
You can move the camera with the arrow keys. Every session starts at a random location. To make it easier to share your population with other people, you can determine the location with GET parameters like ?x=12&y=1704.

The idea is to build your own population, seek for others and to find them, maybe connect your population with them.

Shared World is written in JavaScript(/HTML/CSS) with HTML5 canvas at the client side and with Python (2.7) with cherrypy and ws4py at the server side and uses WebSockets. Unluckily Python has a problem with sockets which did not appear when using and testing locally. To make the game stable enough to play, I had to reduce the size of the landscape structures, so mountains are really rare, islands are not. It may still happen (regularly) that the game tells you the error appeared. Please reload (as often as needed). When the whole screen is loaded successfully, it is usually stable.

Disclaimer: The server runs on a Raspberry Pi and currently stores the whole world in memory. If your screen keeps being white, it could have crashed, so I would like to hear that, so I could restart the server.

A word to the source: For the client the index.html, js/game.js and css/style.css files are simply to be served by any web server (apache, nginx, ...). The server consists out of main.py and conworlds.py. To execute it, run main.py with python (2). cherrypy and ws4py need to be installed. Be aware that the default server location (tooldev.de:2048) is hardcoded in the client (js/game.js).