This week is Life 2.0 Fall, presenting by Dr. Dobbs of CMP Media. (link) If you remember, CMP recently announced that it was offering metaverse development services.
There's a whole load of good panels this week, and you can listen in both in-world (if you had the foresight to RSVP) or you can listen online by registering, confirming your email address, and following a link in your email back to Life20.net.
I'm Speaking
As I said, I'm looking forward to a number of panels and speakers, and I will also be a panelist in a very exciting panel tomorrow, Tuesday the 18th from 1 - 2 pm PST. The topic is METAVERSE METRICS AND ANALYTICS" and I'll be sharing a panel with some lovely folks: designer and development company owner Aimee Weber, blogger and Saijo City creator Eric Rice aka Spin Martin, Jared Freedman aka Ancient Shriner of Code4 Software, and Joel Greenburg of Electric Sheep Company.
What's interesting and worthwhile about this topic is we'll be attempting to come up with some ideas on new metrics to measure virtual worlds like Second Life, and why current paradigms like "hits" and "traffic" don't adequately measure real success.
Our panel will clearly be the most awesomest [sic] of the bunch (*tongue-in-cheek*), though from the list on the program, there are a whole host of worthy panels and speakers to listen to. Attend! Now!
9/17/2007
Dr. Dobbs' Life 2.0 Fall
9/11/2007
Top 10 Reasons Why You Are Convinced to Market in Second Life
NOTE: I humbly apologize for my error in this article, where I originally mis-named the news agency responsible for the "flying genitalia" security incident while interviewing Anshe Chung. The mistake was wholly unintentional and was a simple mix-up on my part. I'm sorry.
I just happened upon a blog at HP by an Eric Kintz here, entitled, "Top 10 Reasons Why I Still Need to Be Convinced About Marketing In Second Life."
Eric starts out optimistic about virtual worlds, but concludes rapidly that "it's too early." He provides 10 reasons. I believe Eric is wrong in just about all his sentiments, and he's more or less reciting another 10 myths about Second Life. So, let's correct myth:
#1. The technology is still too complex – it takes an average user too long to feel comfortable navigating, teleporting or flying. See Steve Rubel’s take on the need for PC horsepower.
Eric starts off his list with a sentiment I agree with. He gets it wrong in that it's not PC horsepower - it's Linden Lab's architecture. It's also the "Ugly Myspace" effect - amateurs tend to often build highly laggy, unoptimized builds, just like so many MySpace pages take extra-long to load because of all the random crap they've posted in it.
Still, Eric's point is correct - the learning curve for SL is steep. Linden Lab has stated that it takes about 20 hours for a user to reach a tipping point where they are most likely retained than lost. (Though I think "lost" is a temporary state until the metaverse becomes even more popular.) At my company, Involve, we are actively co-developing our own orientation experience to assist with this problem. Our aim is to get users acquainted and comfortable in a matter of an hour or two or less, and facilitate their transition to a regular user.
However, what Eric fails to realize is that if we compare Second Life (and other virtual worlds) to the traditional Internet, there are a whole lot more obstacles that were around to the Internet taking off in 1994 than there are blocking Second Life's success today.
For example, in 1994:
1. Hardly anyone owned a computer at home.
2. Unless you worked in an office, you might not even know how to type. Many office people two-fingered their way through a typewriter.
3. Typewriters, the preferred word-processor.
4. Websites on every advertisement and manufactured product? Fat chance.
5. E-mail? What's that?
6. High speed Internet? That's a 4800 baud modem.
7. Cell phones? For doctors, movie producers, and drug dealers.
8. Text messaging? We had IRC, and by "we", I mean, a tiny population of uber-geeks.
9. Being transparent meant listing your name and number in the phone book.
10. Microsoft? If you're a computer geek, you'd know they've come up with a new DOS version.
11. Online ordering? Insanity! Who would order anything on the Internet? That's unsafe!
12. 3-D graphics? Isn't that what huge movie studios (and no one else) can afford?
So think about all these hurdles, and so many others, that we had to jump to get to our precious Web 2.0 today with social networking, high-speed communication, networking and file-sharing, and 3-D displays. On a social, technical, and skill-set level, we had to surmount a huge learning curve. In fact, it took nearly 10 years before we could safely say, "Just about everyone's on the Internet" in America.
Now, by contrast, take the jump to a virtual world:
1. You need a PC that was either new 3 years ago, or costs about $400 today.
2. You need broadband, which most people have anyway.
3. You need some notion of online trust and commerce, established already by sites like Wikipedia, eBay, and Amazon.com
4. You need people to expect 3-D graphics. Gee, we can see that in the movies, video games, and television on a common basis.
5. You need an idea of social networking, provided by a stream of social networking sites.
Oh, and then there's the big one:
1. You use an avatar to navigate a 3-D space, rather than just click on a flat, "magazine-like" webpage.
Seems insignificant now, doesn't it?
#2. The model is not yet scaleable – Second Life can only accommodate less than 100 people in one place at any point of time, not a very exciting statistic for a large brand
Well, then you're thinking about event planning wrong. Not only has it been known for a long time that you can stick an event at the 4-corners of a sim, but if a person bothers to think outside the box, they can reach out to thousands of people using sharding, video streaming, mixed reality aspects, and other technology.
And there's rumors running around about sims with much higher capacity within the year.
#3. The subscriber statistics are misleading - my colleague Scott Berg has an interesting statistic: if you take subscribers online at any given point of time and Second Life square mileage, Second Life’s density is 23,000 per square mile compared to 143,000 for Manhattan. Except for a few places, you will meet few people on a Second Life tour. Check out these pix on Valleywag.
That's an interesting thought, but, as usual, Valleywag is its usual misleading rag. Manhattan is a microcosm that only can exist in a world with 6 billion residents. NYC only reaches such a high resident density by being one of the major hubs of trade in the world. So, let's take 6 billion people over the 196,940,000 square miles of earth, and you get not quite 30.5 people per square mile. Gee, that'd make Second Life the winner by a factor of over 750 times.
But the bottom line is that both figures are misleading. Second Life shouldn't be compared with real world real estate, because of the simple fact that the real world has a limited commodity of land. In the virtual world, people are able to afford more land than they can in the real world, and so the square miles of the virtual world should always be much higher than the real world.
#4. The model’s scaleability is further threatened by a corporate IT backlash. According to a recent survey by Sophos, 90.4 percent of IT pros want to block users from accessing Second Life and other similar sites; and 62 percent find it essential to block users from accessing from their corporate PCs. The reasons include increased IT security risks; burden to company bandwidth, and wasting valuable business time.
Well, it is true that most IT departments are restrictive. Most companies block much larger company software and sites, like AOL Instant Messenger, or Microsoft Messenger. So really, I think it's irrelevant. As needs arise, rules will be changed.
As for "wasting valuable business time", I want to point out to Eric that this is an absolutely loaded statement. You're trying to provide reasons why Second Life is a waste of time; stating that it is would be cyclical logic. So scratch that altogether.
#5. The content is primarily adult oriented – None of the top 20 destinations is adult oriented in the web; most of them are on Second Life.
Eric could have scored another point if he had said "A lot of the content is adult oriented", but instead he made the completely unsupported assertion that most of it is. In fact, the overwhelming amount of content is personal land that people plop a house down. It's their equivalent of a homepage or social networking space.
Of activities in Second Life, the overwhelming majority are clubs. While the top 20 locations in Second Life may or may be adult oriented, realize most of the stuff that goes on at them is that people dance scantily clad and try and hook up. But how is that different from any city or town in America? People go out to clubs, bars, and yes, people hook up, people drink, and people under 21 aren't supposed to get in. The truly R and X rated places in Second Life? Not in the top 20.
As for the assertion that the majority of Second Life is sex? Well, a tremendous amount of the Internet is sex. I question why anyone can possibly fault Second Life, or any other virtual world, for following a long-standing web paradigm?
"Are you ready to take the risk of having one of your press events attacked by animated flying genitals?"
I've personally told CNet that they screwed up big time on the Anshe Chung interview. Had they bothered to change a few minor settings in the land, that would not have happened. Second Life's reputation should not suffer for Reuters' piss-poor security on one single event.
And you'll note that CNet hasn't made that mistake since, despite having plenty of events. So they're doing it the right way.
In the same manner, I wouldn't leave the root password on my network server as "password". I also wouldn't skip critical updates to Windows, either. But, time and time again, people do, and frankly? Shit happens. This is in no way a valid criticism of Second Life or any virtual world.
#6. Brands are underestimating the investments required. Most brands have focused on the upfront cost (i.e buying land, web design and creative fees), but most have not taken into account the on-going investment into Second Life. Most indigenous businesses will have hosts and even the owner welcoming you to the island or store – most branded islands do not have any employees and operate on self service.
Eric makes a good point here. I'm going to give it to him, outright as a valid comment. However, it's not a criticism of Second Life, as he stated in the beginning; it's a criticism of the people mismanaging their Second Life projects. Nice try, Eric, but that's a straw man.
"Furthermore many indigenous businesses pay other residents to dance on their properties (a tradition in Second Life to boost your ranking) and I have not seen any brand operate that way."
I just wanted to comment that while this may be true for clubs, the overwhelming amount of businesses in Second Life don't need dancers, as they are selling stuff like clothes or vehicles or whatnot, and have nothing to do with dancing. Hence, if hiring dancers makes sense with the attraction a corporation has set up in Second Life, then perhaps they should consider hiring dancers. (Though I will say, it seems Showtime's L-Word doesn't need it, because their clubs are popular without them.)
#7. Brands are not staying true to the Second Life values. Second Life is about realizing your fantasies and being something different than you are in real life.
No! No no no no no no.
SOME aspects are fantasy fulfilment, however a great deal of it, dare I suggest the majority, is about social networking. Is MySpace "fantasy fulfilment"? I think not!
"Many avatars have a different gender than the subscriber or take animal forms. However most brands mimic their real life experiences and value proposition in Second Life."
This is a good point that Eric makes.
"Brands have also disrupted the local economy by offering some of their goods and services, prompting a backlash by residents. 70% of Second Life residents are disappointed by the branded experiences."
First of all, Eric has artificially stuck these two statements together. By doing so he implies a correlation which he does not provide any support for, nor is there any out there that I'm aware of.
Secondly, there has been no statistics gathered on how much the economy has been disrupted. On the other hand, I've personally seen the Second Life economic statistics, available on Linden Lab's blog monthly, and never ever have I heard anyone ever say, "Gee, look at that dip in the economy when XYZ Company has released a product!" I'm sorry, but virtual Scions have not crushed the SL car market. If anything, it helps innovate it, but more likely, it's a whole different market, because someone like Scion goes for realism.
I challenge Eric to provide any sort of substantiated proof to his statement!
#8. Second Life experiences are not integrated with the overall brand experience. New Second Life ventures by leading brands still feel too much to me like PR coups vs. being truly integrated into the broader set of the brand promise and experience. How many brands have a link from their online branded presence to their Second Life presence and seamlessly connect both?
Weather Channel, Dell, L-Word, NBC, CBS, to name a few. There have been websites, TV spots, even a SUPERBOWL COMMERCIAL. How much bigger of connecting does Eric expect?
#9. Potential revenues and profits are limited. ...
And so is the Internet. Amazon.com ran in the red for years, and their main purpose was commerce. Considering most of the web is P.R., I'd say Second Life is firmly on track. You're not going to sell virtual widgets in Second Life, but you may enhance existing product experiences and support services. And it's proven extremely useful in education.
#10. I barely have time for my first life……
Lame. Sorry, but it's lame. No Westerner has time for anything, yet when something new comes along that's worthwhile, they sacrifice and make time. That's the way the world works. When the Internet came along, no one had time to check e-mail, text messages, surf sites, etc, but we're all doing it today.
So, for those keeping score:
Eric: 1
Me: 9
Back at you Eric. Care to back up your arguments and rebut? Or perhaps concede on some?
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