Many Metaversed readers have already read TechCrunch's post about our plans to create a "Metaverse Market Index" (MMI). Here is my view on what we are trying to accomplish...and perhaps more importantly, what we are NOT trying to do.
The primary motivation for this project is laid out in three separate but related posts by Christian Renaud. Two points resonate particularly strongly for me. First, people who are investing in virtual worlds need information on the world's prospects. It doesn't matter whether they are consumers looking for social networking, entrepreneurs looking to create an inworld business, or a corporate giant looking for a way to market their brand or teleconference with employees and clients. Second, the stakes of making the right decision are particularly high because investments in one world are currently not portable to other worlds (though hats off to Multiverse for trying to make this happen on their platform).
The key goal of MMI is to create reliable, meaningful and consistent information about three aspects of virtual worlds: the size and engagement of its user base; the vibrancy of its economy; and the key aspects of its technology. The first two goals should help people who are making decisions to invest in virtual worlds in the absence of inter-operability; the third should help platform developers move toward inter-operability.
Clearly this won't be easy. We will need to maintain independence and have broad representation, which we are doing by being a nonprofit organization with an advisory panel drawn from all quarters of the virtual world community. We will need lots of funding (hint, hint) from companies that don't have virtual worlds on which we are reporting, so that our independence is not compromised. And we will need cooperation from virtual world developers, so that we can provide the public with high-quality information.
We will also need to make sure people understand what we are not trying to do. We are not trying to impose our own definitions of what is and is not a virtual world. Raph Koster's post , along with its comments, make clear why doing so would be a mistake. Our plan is to view the metaverse very broadly--as I say in my own comment to Raph's post, I like the word "metaverse" because no one knows what the %@#! it means, so it is hard for someone to exclude a platform others argue should be included.
Second, we are not trying to impose any technology on existing platforms. Instead, we just want to report on the technologies that platforms are using, so that the developers can make intelligent decisions.
What we are trying to do is create standards for reporting meaningful information. As an accounting professor who works fairly closely with the Financial Accounting Standards Board, this is familiar territory for me. Everyone knows that Second Life doesn't have 9 million residents. Accountants would say that number is not a faithful representation of what people actually care about: how many people use the platform regularly, and how engaged are they when they are using it. (I frequently have it running in the background, in case anything comes up.) Naturally, key numbers will have different meanings in different platforms. Thus, we will need to develop a taxonomy to capture and talk about these differences.
I will be at the Virtual Worlds Conference next week. If you are interested in working with us on this project--or better yet, providing us with funding--please let me know.
