How Social Search & Presence Apps will Save the Metaverse

One of the issues facing Second Life, the 3D streaming poster child of user created virtual worlds, is the paradoxical problem of too much content. Residents can literally create what they wish, with little or no restraint, which is fantastic, but the speed at which content is generated (buildings, regions, hair, clothes, anything...) is disproportionate, to the young worlds concurrent population. What this means, is that many new residents' first experience is of the vast emptiness of unpopulated regions, corporate ghost towns and the poor quality crap that most of us manage to create. They then file the experience under "been there, done that", and never return.

This week, like one of the commenters on a Terra Nova post entitled The Dark Side of User-Created Content, I had an "aha! moment", as several things I felt I knew intuitively, but had not fully clicked, fell into place.

Social Search as a means of discovery on the 2D web has risen in recent years, and today, sites like Digg and Del.icio.us dominate the way many web savvy people discover new content. There are literally scores of Social Search sites, and in every niche you can find some variation on the social news, or social bookmarking theme. These work well. They're not perfect though. They suffer from spamming, as well as quality issues, and often it takes some time to sift through the crap to find the best content. But they do work, and have become a staple tool of online media consumption.

Jim Purbrik, a Linden Lab employee who's Second Life persona is Babbage Linden, admits that the inworld Search system isn't doing a great job: "As long as it's always as easy to find the good stuff, people will cluster there and ignore the vast swathes of sketched experiences. Unfortunately search in SL isn't doing a great job of keeping up with the fire hose of content at the moment.". Third party recommendation engines such as Gridmarker and Sloog are already addressing this problem however, and as they gain users, their value as discovery tools for the virtual world increase.

Recommendation isn't enough though. People can tell you what's hot, or not, but if it's empty when you get there, it's still shit. Right?

What's needed, is the added dimension of presence. Jerry Paffendorf, resident futurist at the Electric Sheep Company provided my aha! here by helping me realize why Twitter.com (see my Twitter page here) is so popular amongst Second Life'rs:

Some of the solutions that I see emerging for open virtual world search, built on top of more traditional search engines and tagging and bookmarking schemes because you still need that information out there, are emerging on the web with realtime "what are you doing right now?" search and exposure engines like Twitter and Me.dium.

A New Kind of Search Service

So imagine this It doesn't exist yet, but it will, and soon.

• Social bookmarking and commenting of landmarks.
• Tagging of bookmarks and Flickr like collections and groups
• Passive social networking based on groups, similar tags etc
• Realtime presence indicators - Who's tagging what, right now
• Voting, Digg style -- Crowd sourcing.
• Important bit: Integrated into the viewer. Though this will work with a HUD, it would be so much more effective if the whole system were built into the default software.

Sounds like a web 2.0 wank fest to me, but it might just be the outline of a true killer Search app for Second Life, and as Jerry and Babbage hinted at, a solution to the ghost town syndrome of a rapidly expanding Metaverse.

Thoughts?