I have been doing a weekly vodcast looking at the week in Second Life. It's all bit informal at present but seems at least to be becoming presentable. This is tonight's show which I co-host with Tara Yeats. We are joined by Stuart Wharf , together with Fleep Tuque and Zoe Connolly , in the studio.
Hope you like it. The 2 parts were broadcast about 2 hours apart.
Spending time in Second Life is like riding a roller coaster at lightening speed. Before you know it you have spent a lifetime worth of experiences in here. It has been interesting, the good, along with the not so good.
I have been in Second Life since August '06 and have tried many things; some for pure enjoyment and some for financial gain (dreaming of it anyway). I've bought land, sold land, had land stolen from me, owned a bed and breakfast that made it to the most popular list (then I sold it). I bought my first island when I was one month old. It was a brave new world I thought so I shall be brave too and dive right in. I was SL married within two months which lasted only three months haha. Yes indeed I was a brave little lassie. However I have taken some of my knowledge of owning over 24 sims since I entered Second Life and turned it into something I think can help others. I joined up with two other women and we provide security consulting. We come in and evaluate groups of sims or large Estates and let the owner know where the weaknesses are and we finish it up by providing solutions and doing some staff training. It's fun because I do enjoy teaching and how else can I legally hop a ban line or sink a sim! What an adventure!
Overall the good outweighs the bad. I'm looking forward to my next year in Second Life. Oh and btw --- remarried in SL again and it is working perfectly! We are nearing our six month anniversary!
Cheers
Dharma Austin
The first real run of a weekly chat session I have started with Tara Yeats. The idea is to review the week in SL from a residents perspective and the programme should be live every Saturday at 7pm in the UK - 11am SLT.
http://operator11.com/shows/4091 to watch or join in. It's open house but we can only have 8 guests in the studio with video at any one time.
Second Life user Sky Eclipse has a problem: something about their account or their avatar causes the sim they are in to crash. The sim they are in crashes as soon as they log in to it , if I understand the problem correctly, leaving them no way to do anything like remove attachments or delete the last few items they acquired.
The only solution for this problem lies in the hands of Linden Lab: either fix Sky Eclipse's account, or fix the sim crash problem such that Sky Eclipse's account remains just as it is but the sim Sky is in doesn't crash.
There's a Second Life Jira issue to vote on related to Sky Eclipse's problem. The Jira issue is at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2281 ; if you'd like to help Sky Eclipse by convincing Linden Lab to devote resources to solving this problem go to https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2281 and vote for the issue. (Only members of SL can vote for SL Jira issues, so if you aren't an SL user, just join SL at secondlife.com, then vote for Sky's Jira issue. )
There's a thread in the SL forums, forums.secondlife.com, at http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?p=1661915#post1661915 where you can read about this if you have access to forums.secondlife.com.
The Sky Eclipse Jira issue VWR-2281 reads as follows
:
Second Life Viewer - VWR
Sky Eclipse's avatar crashes regions EVERYTIME she logs in, regardless of where she logs in
Created: Friday 02:42 AM Updated: Saturday 04:58 PM
Component/s: Crashes
Affects Version/s: 1.18.3
Fix Version/s: None
File Attachments: 1. debug_info.log (4 kb)
2. SecondLife.log (161 kb)
Environment: « Hide
CPU: AMD K7 (Unknown model) (1396 MHz)
Memory: 256 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP (Build 2600)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 6200/AGP/SSE/3DNOW!
OpenGL Version: 2.0.3
An interview from SLCC. Recorded by a French company, but in English.
Originally posted on our house blog, This is Herd
In early June, the Guardian reported on the Beijing municipality using MindArk , the Swedish developers of online world, 'Entropia', to build a virtual world capable of holding seven million residents at any one time.
As Metaversed readers know, Second Life has nine million avatars though only around 50,000 are online at any one time and even that can put a strain on some of the more popular locations. This new world would create 10,000 full time jobs and based on the seven million figure, would be bigger than most 'real' countries on earth today.
Reports from the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age in Australia have shed some more light on how this new world - now called 'Dotman' - is taking shape. Speaking at a technology forum in Melbourne earlier this month, Beijing Cyber Recreation District (CRD) President David Liu focused very much on Dotman as a business tool.
Unlike existing virtual worlds where escapism, leisure and entertainment came first and business a distant second (one of the reasons why brands have struggled to make an impact in Second Life), Dotman's evolution will happen the other way around. It will be largely a place for Far East companies to do business in a virtual setting to the point that many employees will no longer require real world offices. Individuals, "Dotmen", will also be able to set up businesses and become self-employed.
Anyone doubting that Dotman will open for business in 2008 as planned and with the seven million resident capacity, should pay a visit to Shanghai or Beijing to get a sense that if the Chinese want something to happen, it will. In Shanghai a completely new city with hundreds of skyscrapers has been built across the river from the old city centre in less than ten years, and Beijing's Olympic preparations are very much on time.
So what's the relevance to us here in Europe and the UK? My guess is that Dotman will primarily be of interest to UK companies wanting a virtual bridge to the Chinese market.
The wider implication is that Entropia developers Mind Ark will have experience of building a 3D platform on a much wider scale than currently exists, and there's no reason why they couldn't use that to revamp Entropia or create a completely new virtual world that's both brand friendly and appeals to the mass of consumers who take part in social networking sites but not places like Second Life or There.
The Gartner report earlier this year predicting that 80% of regular Internet users would have a virtual world presence by 2011 did point out that the presence in question wouldn't necessarily be in the virtual worlds around today.
Much like the AOL / Compuserve walled garden model of 1996/97 didn't become the norm for Internet users today, it might be a new virtual world that finally gives the medium mass appeal, and whatever Mind Ark has in the pipeline in future years could be a very strong candidate.
In today's Guardian, Marina Hyde hangs a feature about online and virtual existences around the latest figures showing that we're spending more and more time online. Her main point is that whatever we are escaping from, human nature will always prevail and that ultimately the Internet and online environments are purely "geography."
As part of that argument, Marina looks briefly at Second Life and reels off lines from the "satirical" Get a First Life site: "Your First Life dream world awaits. Hang out at the mall! Embarrass yourself in gym class! Get acne! Experiment with mind-altering recreational drugs!" The message is clear: a life lived online is a life half lived."
Personally I think Marina misses the point. Most people would agree that escaping into a fantasy world isn't very healthy. But for me the interesting thing isn't how it can replace the real world, but how it can enhance it when the two work side by side.
In a previous post, on our house blog, a colleague of mine gave an example of a story we did for Vauxhall Corsa about the benefits of a dummy run virtual date before you have a real one. Universities are opening up virtual campuses, giving students a richer distance learning experience than was previously the case. And the subject of a series of Design Museum talks in June, architects are using the virtual environment to experiment with building designs.
It's also worth looking at what people are 'escaping' from, and for most people the answer is something fairly mundane. And that's a night spent in front of the telly. In the April issue of Prospect, Victor Keegan posed the question of what was more 'real' - being glued to Big Brother, or interacting with real human beings, albeit in a virtual and online environment?
Giving the example of a (virtual) neighbour who helped him build an art gallery in Second Life, Victor Keegan also pointed out that it's a much friendlier and more sociable environment than we'd encounter in our day to day existences. For example, people actually talk to strangers, an action that would more likely than not paint you as being crazy were you to try it on London's public transport system!
Finally there's the green dimension. In last week's Spiked, Nathalie Rotschild took a look at the (London) Heathrow (Airport) climate camp where the protesters had grouped their tents into where they were from.
To Nathalie Rotschild, this showed the parochial, closed and frankly depressing nature of the world that awaits us if you take climate control to its extreme. I take it as a given that meeting people from other places is a good thing, and if we can no longer fly to meet people from different countries, then maybe this is an alternative environment where we can still interact with them.
Many satellite users are having severe problems with Second Life voice at the moment, including some of my friends in world. According to my discussions with those very helpful folks at Vivox, and a recent discussion with Joe Linden at a metaversed.com event, the problem is actually with the spatial aspects of the audio system - point to point calls can still work.
This has been the case with my friend, however most of the time she just can’t connect to the voice network at all. Anyway I decided to try to form a workaround - however it requires multiple computers.
Having skype calls with my friend seemed to be faultless, so basically I skyped my friend on a laptop and, using pysical cables, routed the output from her call into the SL voice input of an avatar of mine, then routed the output of SL voice from that machine back into the input on the laptop. So she was speaking through a proxy avatar.
It worked really well - she could hear everyone in world, allbeit from the position of my alt avatar, and speak clearly back to everyone with seemingly no delay. Of course all of this relies on having a friend with multiple computers and the correct audio cables.
Hope its useful for some satellite users ! I’m sure the guys at Vivox will hate it, but it bridges a gap at the moment!
Tonight's programme from the Twitter Vodcast. I join Goldie Katsu to talks about Second Life.
Have you ever watched a ball game “through the fence”? Yesterday’s meeting in Second Life with Gartner analyst Steve Prentice was kind of like that for a few of us Avatars that could not get into the meeting sim!
I was one of the AVs that were “Looking over the fence” in yesterday’s meeting. Watching from another Sim was kind of like watching from outside a ball park, peering in through, or over the fence posts. I could see the game, but I couldn't hear everything, and I would have preferred to be in the park!
It was interesting to discover that even with camera restraints removed, the limit for voice was different than the limits for camera view. From the adjacent Sim, some of us were able to hear some speakers, but others were just not heard, not even slightly. There was no sound coming from them despite the camera being trained on them. Upon moving physically closer to the sim edge, and therefore closer to the speakers AV’s, they were suddenly and remarkably audible. Using the coordinates of the speaker and the listener AV, I calculate this limit to be approximately 72m.
The other frustration was that from the adjacent Sim we were unable to ‘see’ local chat. This fact was especially painful since we were able to hear the AVs typing, but saw no corresponding text!
Based on this experience I have a couple of suggestions:
1. If the meeting was held so that it was on the corner of 4 sims, you could conceivably have 4 times as many AV’s able to hear the meeting. Using Camera controls, they would see everything, and it’s “the next best thing to being there”. In addition, I did see my name in the voice window along with all of the other names, so I would guess that I could have participated in a voice conversation. I wonder what the limits are for number of people in the voice list.
2. If everyone was encouraged to use group chat vs open or nearby chat, then everyone in the meeting could communicate together. Yesterday, the AVs who were at a distance could not see the chat of the speakers, or of many others that were in the actual meeting Sim. Therefore we missed out on the chat portion of the show, which as you know can be a source of some of the most interesting comments. Using group chat would also enable anyone listening live to the podcast to monitor the chat and comment from anywhere in world.
I think that these 2 changes could help as a stopgap measure as we continue to grow our group and exceed the general limits of the system. This would have changed yesterday's experience to one of being "Virtually" in the park. :-)
Thanks to 57 Miles for arranging another great meeting. I appreciate the ones we have done thus far, and I look forward to the future ones that seem to become more and more interesting as this exciting world develops!
Ginko, the bank which folded August 9 and converted all deposits to bonds, has successfully migrated all the hapless depositor-cum-investor accounts over to the World Stock Exchange (WSE), a body that itself has been rocked with scandal involving an alleged hack and theft by a former employee and a curious new and ubiquitous type of company called "RMV" -- which stands for "removed" because it's been liquidated or delisted.
Nevertheless, the trading floor at the WSE was hopping, with traffic today showing 26,000 without camp chairs. The bonds, which were trading at L$0.16 on the day of the collapse are now at L$0.25 as of this date, and trading briskly. I watched as one big stock market player bought up 4 million of the bonds (about $2700 US dollars' worth) and asked for another 1 million; and another big developer was told unceremoniously that he could not make a buy due to a lack of a "risk API". Although one man had a tag saying "Goddamn Ginko's!" most people dociley lined up, typed "reset password" to get a tempory log-in, and immediately found their accounts, which had been automatically opened for them at wselive.com Some were selling immediately, but in the last two days, I've seen quite a few imagining that they've bought into a sure thing, that will climb in value, enable them to sell out just in time before the big boys figure it out, and make a killing. My balance of 6000 or so Lindens, which I had in fact converted to a 90-day CD lol, was now listed as a Ginko's Perpetual Bond valued at about 1500, or about 25 percent of the value of the original Linden deposit.
Something called BCX, yet another bank and investment outfit, convened what was billed as the 1st Annual SL Banking Forum this afternoon. It was predictably rowdy and crowded and replete with 3 non-English babblers translating into other languages. The audience consisted of a wide range of prominent investors, annoyed Ginko customers, kibbitzers, rubberneckers and a few obvious b/tard alts. All in all, the usual SL happy family. While the conversation was wildly off-topic, larded with insults and cries of foul, a few rational thoughts began to emerge. The SLSEC was invoked, but critiqued for containing some of the very companies listed. There are now insurance companies offering to insure deposits (one called "The Rock"). Quite naturally, consumers asked how on earth they'd validate the fact that a customer or a bank had a certain amount on deposit. This speaks to the need we've raised with Linden Lab for years of a function that would generate a verified accounts statement showing an avatar's balance and transactions. That would have been possible as an inworld tool last year, when we had the balance sheets in our groups as a tab, but it was such a hard draw on the dbase that LL pulled it. If there was a way to revisit this issue through inworld changes to the groups in the client or through verified exported data from the website, that would be a huge boon to business.
A vigorous debate was held on the issue of a prudent float to hold. 40 percent? The inability for Ginko to cash out depositors when there was a run on the bank was uppermost in everyone's minds. Nobody Fugazi was urgently calling for a cap on interest rates -- though it was impossible to see by whom or how this would be enforced. Others called for the market to determine it. There were the usual calls for transparency -- but as I've pointed out -- how, and *to whom*? If the information is aggregated in one place, that puts certain powers in the hands of coders and dbase managers that gives them an edge in the economy. All of these fledgling companies and institutions suffer from the appearance, if not the actuality, of conflict of interest and self-dealing. And with the range of economic philosophies from anarcho-capitalism to socialism, it's difficult to enforce criteria for business on every entity.
It's unlikely that a set of banking regulations will emerge out of a rough-and-ready investment community now in SL, but it's possible that some larger entities will simply get started. Most in the room did not want RL regulators to take over, or for Linden Lab to open a bank and put others out of business. At the end of the day, without rules and enforcibility, as Arbitrage Wise, CEO of SL Capital Exchange, put it sagely, "Right now, the engine that drives SL is trust. Do business with people that you trust."
If you were imagining that all the banking turmoil means the entire economy is about to tank, you had some reassurance given the stability of the Linden, where you can still sell 266 Lindens for US $1.00. The volume appears to be down somewhat, which is an important indicator of SL economic health, but that could well be due to all the grid malfunctioning the Lindens have been experiencing in the last week.
At her Friday office hour, Meta Linden, who keeps the economic statistics, admitted that LL had lost 5800 premium customers in July -- evidently not due to island purchases or a lack of value in the stipend package, but because they were unable to pay for their accounts, which chronic and exasperating billing problems.
Meta declined to give a figure for how much casino activity made up the SL economy, though she said it was and is tracked.
Asked about the Ginko story and how much was tied up in the bank, Meta Linden said, "From what I can tell that figure of total deposits was VERY questionable; it included interest and it included loans into the system at least, possibly more." When I noted this might be a good sign, she commented, "yes, sort-of. :\ It's good that maybe not so much was tied up in it, but not good that any was." That's about all you can get out of LL on the matter of Ginko and other banks, and this seemed to be primarily a personal assessment from Meta; she acknowledged that she's been focusing much more on metrics for stability. "System failures by far had the greatest effect on the economy," she said, followed by billing problems and the gambling ban.
Discussing the nature of the gambling quotient of the SL economy (though not the volume), Meta commented:
"As near as we can tell the end result of the gambling ban reaches approximately an internal metric we've been using called "Net resident to resident transactions" which nets out transactions back-and-forth between 2 residents in the same day. The final numbers for Net R2R [resident-to-resident transactions] is about 75% of total R2R, and the Net R2R *after* gambling ban is almost identical to prior, meaning that gambling was a lot of fast back and forth activity not not very much L$ in the hands of the casino owners at the end of the day."
I'll note this doesn't take into account the diverse empires of casino owners, however, which includes rentals, vendors, financial services, clubs, and prostitution.
Hey folks! I've got a blog going at http://slbizreview.com/ which is going to be the business blog for the new company Indigenis ("Native Intelligence for Virtual Worlds") -- we're so new, I'm not opening up our main web site yet.
But I wanted to point this community at the blog, which has what I hope is some thought provoking articles on business in SL.
Indigenis has three core partners with serious RL business chops before our Second Lives started in 2005:
Shava Suntzu (me, Shava Nerad IRL) -- I've been working in computing since 1978, online since 1982 -- when I was Chief Software Engineer at DEC on the first commercial multimedia authoring system, IVIS. I started my web consultancy, Net Prophets, Inc., in 1995, when the web was about where SL is now. I've also been a VP in a prominent entertainment marketing company with a portfolio of clients including HBO, Sony Pictures, VIZ Media, Paramount Pictures, and dozens of others. I'm an in-world journalist, makeover artist, and general co-conspirator to a lot of nifty projects in-world, and decided perhaps my friends and I have a ticket on the cluetrain for how to bring businesses into SL.
Elliott Eldrich is a great architect/builder project manager, property manager, and our COO. He has a long background in Silicon Valley business.
Tuna Oddfellow's event planning business was one of the first in SL. He's an in-demand party planner and entertainer, and recently won a million lindens when NBC selected him as SL's most talented avatar.
Our friends lists and acquaintances include the most talented builders, designers, scripters -- some of the most creative, experienced, and reliable folks in SL. Our goal is to negotiate work with outside companies and manage projects that bring good real-dollar contracts to the best talent in-world.
My observation so far is that most of the big SL companies (Esheep, RRR, MoU) are hiring outside folks now, as fast as they can, and never had the understanding of big corporate cultures (which we do, and we survived! :). Big agencies coming in, like Text100, are late comers to SL culture. We have a bridge to build, not only to satisfy companies coming in, but to see that SL doesn't become just some Street, some dystopian billboard.
Hoping to do well by doing good!
Shava Nerad/Shava Suntzu in SL, shava -at- indigenis -dot- com
Last Friday I moderated a panel discussion on financial markets. We quickly hit our limit of 50 avatars on Dr. Dobb's Island's, and convinced them to risk crashing the sim to let in a few more. And a few more.....ultimately, we had 70 people attending, including several members of the RL and SL press. Nick tells me this was by far the best-attended Metaversed geek-meet so far.
Three topics were particularly contentious. First, when I noted the *possibility* that the markets could be "viewed as a game," the audience chat when off the charts, mostly in vehement disagreement. However, the exchange leaders clearly agreed with the view that the exchanges are a game.
From there, the discussion moved right into the prevalence of fraud. The heads of the exchanges (Maelstrom Baphomet representing AVIX, LukeConnell Vendeverre representing WSE) emphasized the relatively low rate of fraud, and their strong attempts to limit it, but from the extensive post-panel audience discusion, many were clearly unconvinced.
Some people seemed to think that the efforts of the Second Life Exchange Commission (SLEC, headed by TraderJohn Susa) were encouraging, but that led to the third point of controversy: whether self-appointed regulators would do more harm then good, by being in the pocket of the exchanges, or annointed friends of the Lindens.
I tried to remain carefully objective during the panel, but for the record, here is my own take on these three issues. First, I don't believe that the exchanges are a game. After all, these exchanges have raised about $1.5 Million (US, not linden), and there is no objective other than whatever the individuals involve are seeking (which I am guessing is money).
Second, I think fraud is a real concern in this markets, and the exchanges themselves could do more to improve investor confidence, such as having better disclosure about trades, and better separation between managers who issue shares and the businesses they control. (More first-life disclosure would be nice too).
Finally, while I understand the *potential* for problems with self-appointed regulators being extortionists or annointed busy-bodies, I think those concerns are far outweighed by the likely benefits of regulation done right. I hope the SLEC will be able to succeed in their task, or if not them, another group.
Were you at the panel? What did you think?
Do you know the future or do you want to influence the future?
Please start here if you'd like to converse with me!
http://sllibrarians.ning.com/profile/oberon
Thanks!
OO
There's been a lot of focus on how companies like IBM use Second Life for virtual meetings. But I think something with a bigger potential impact - and something that is often overlooked - is the number of Universities and colleges coming on board to build virtual campuses.
Not overlooked from the point of view of how SL can help distance learning, which has been discussed extensively. But what is sometimes ignored is the potential growth that Univerities and their resident communities offer. With all the talk about Second Life's numbers and some brands getting cold feet because their failure to make an impact there, Universities could well save Second Life from stagnation.
To explain:
Universities and colleges seem to be joining on a weekly basis. Here in the UK, the most recent entrants were my old Uni - Edinburgh - and the University of East Anglia (http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/gadgets_and_ga...). They will bring hundreds - in some cases thousands - of new registrations with them.
I am hazarding a guess that the 'suits' from IBM, PA Consulting et al log on, have their meetings and then go back to RL without seeing what else there is. Students are more likely to stick around and explore their environment.
Both Lenore and myself have commented here on the orientation experience, which almost certainly contributes to the high rate of churn. The Universities however will by and large direct new AVs through to their campuses, thus keeping students away from the stereotypical AV walking around with the giant sex organ, at least for the first few hours of their SL experience!
For example SL designer and developer Luna Bliss, is putting the finishing touches on an island for "U21" (www.u21global). Part of the island includes a series of pods that tell you everything from customising your av to how to make money. As I've said before, I think a slimmed down induction experience works better and you log on with like minded people.
Once they finished their courses, the chances are students will follow some of the landmarks they have been given to see what else Second Life has to offer - landmarks that have been chosen to showcase some of the best things in-world.
We all know the potential influence students can have in giving a social medium like SL traction. You only need to look at Facebook for starters. I work for a very young company, which employs around 30 creative, outgoing and fashionable account handlers with an average age of around 24-25.
Just about all of them have Facebook profiles, taking the trouble to update them several times a day. Only a few have SL AVs, and I can say with some certainty they wouldn't have registered had they not been prompted to. The reason is that when they look over a colleague's screen and see a man with a fox's outfit walking around in the background, it all seems just a bit too...well....dungeons and dragons for them. Unlike Facebook, which they use as a posting board about their social lives, it's just not seen as a very cool thing to do.
A mass of students coming on board and being given a reason to use it may well change all that.
Of course for all that to happen, LL has to get the much heralded voice technology right as my last experience of a seminar in SL - last week's talks about architecture hosted by London's Design Museum - was not a great one. The whole discussion (if you want to call it that), moved on with glacial speed, and efforts to get 10 or so AVs TP-ed to one location failed miserably. Once voice is finally here though, it will be an interesting to see the impact that these new communities will have.
In the last post, I responded to the Forbes article and why I think brands so often get it wrong in Second Life. I thought I'd take a few minutes to expand on that a little further, with what I see as the three golden rules for any RL company setting up in SL:
Last month, the corporate world reached an important milestone in Second Life. For the first time, a development built by a real world brand – Germany’s T Online - made it into the top 20 most popular places list. Did T Online achieve this by building some unique, must see draw in Second Life? Er no, they added camping chairs...for anyone reading this not that familiar with SL, these are spots where you park your avatar for a few hours and get some Lindens (the Second Life currency) in exchange. (See http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/06/taterus_monday__1.html#more)
Over the past six months, not a week has gone by where we haven’t been able to read about this or that company establishing a Second Life presence.
For those of us who were around during the first dot.com boom, there are echoes to ten years ago when companies first went online. Not only because of the gold rush mentality. But also because a lot of the same mistakes from the mid to late 90s are being repeated.
Just like a lot of the early brand websites were nothing more than virtual brochures, a lot of marketeers today are using this new 3D web, as another form of advertising.
To put things into perspective: For the week ending 17 June, Addidas was attracting just over 300 visitors a week, Reebok 168 and Coca-Cola 86. In other words Reebok was attracting an average of just one visitor an hour!
In fact, as we know, enthusiastic amateurs, sole traders and SL based businesses that more often than not operate out of people’s front rooms wipe the floor with real world brands. Just to give one example, Second Life fashion retailer ‘Adam n Eve’, run by UK-based resident “Sachi Vixen”, is currently 20x more popular than retailer American Apparel - no wonder AA is thinking of shutting up shop!
Generally speaking, I think there are three reasons why brands get it wrong: They try and transfer a real world experience to the virtual, they come into an environment which has a community suspicious of corporates, and instead of being in it for the long haul, they look for quick hits. To take each of these in turn:
1) Do something different to real life
One of the things which constantly mystifies and amazes me is how many Second Life stores, offices and experiences are obviously built as near-carbon copies of their real world equivalents. A leading, award winning London ad agency for example has a Second Life island, on which they’ve built a large glass office with examples of their work and meeting rooms. Looking at American Apparel again, in his book ‘Second Lives’, author Tim Guest talked about “cheesy pop” blaring in an empty store designed to look like the real one.
Unfortunately trying to recreate your brand experience wholesale in a virtual world, is not only a waste of money. It’s also a waste of a medium where anything goes and which offers huge potential for creativity and doing things differently.
2) Working with in-world residents
Secondly, brands forget that in Second Life someone is almost certainly already doing what they do, and doing it better.
You can buy clothes, go and see a concert, go to a lecture, dance in a nightclub and go on a virtual holiday – all thanks to the efforts of ‘in world’ residents. With an active – and vocal – community in Second Life, being seen to copy them and (worse) being seen to take the food from their tables is not only doomed to failure, it can also attract a considerable amount of hostility.
Instead, any brand wanting to succeed in Second Life needs to a) enhance residents’ in-world experience – and that doesn’t necessarily mean offering real world products virtually, and b) work with the community in developing any property rather than being seen to be just another corporate that’s been parachuted in.
3) A long-term investment instead of a quick-hit
Finally, a number of brands have come in, had quick PR hits after announcing their presence, and left empty brand developments behind. That approach has diminishing returns, especially since the novelty factor of companies setting up shop in Second Life has long since worn off and we are now starting to get - witness that Forbes article - talk about how SL isn't all that for brands after all.
Instead, to be a success here you need to see this as a long-term investment. Especially since Second Life is a medium still in the early stages of development.
At the moment, there are over seven million avatar registrations. However, in terms of frequent users, the numbers are of course just above 500,000. I'm based in the UK and talk to British clients. So to put this into some context for my local market, with 30,000, the UK has the fourth highest number of active residents after the US, Germany and France.
Reaching the audience equivalent of a UK regional daily newspaper doesn’t sound that impressive, until you look at the potential for growth. The number of registered avatars has increased three fold over the past six months, and the Gartner Group recently estimated that by 2011, 80% of regular Internet users will have a virtual world presence.
In addition to the future potential, it’s also instructive to look at usage patterns. Active residents are very committed, devoting on average a phenomenal 90 minutes a day to their virtual existence. These are people who no longer switch on the telly as much at night and so are no longer exposed to TV advertising to the same extent. Brands need to act accordingly and follow them in-world.
In summary then, every marketeer knows about good corporate citizenship. This is a concept that now needs to be taken into virtual worlds. Brands also need to recognise that virtual worlds are a golden opportunity to try something new.
In the late 1990s, the best websites and online businesses were those that saw the need for stickiness, were truly different and added value. In this new Internet, the brands that succeed will again be the ones that engage the consumer in a dialogue and that compliment what s/he does in this virtual environment.
Has the end of the free media ride for Second Life started? Forbes has published an article about brands in Second Life going large on the sex and low on the numbers. A summary is here, and Forbes has free registration to read the whole thing: http://communities.canada.com/shareit/blogs/gamesnews/archive/2007/06/18...
There's a lot of points to take issue with in the Forbes article, but I'll restrict myself to three:
1) "There is nothing to do in Second Life except, pardon my bluntness, try to get laid," blogged David Churbuck, Web-marketing vice president for computer maker Lenovo."
So 'Dave', have you ever actually been on Second Life and if so, how long did you spend there? If you have spent more than the odd hour there then you'd know that what you've just said is...pardon my bluntness...bollocks.
Let's hit that old chestnut of Second Life = sex on the head now.
Yes, it is possible to get laid in Second Life. It's also possible to do a lot of other stuff. The highest number I've seen about porn and sex commerce as a share of the total is 30% - and that figure is in dispute.
To put that into some kind of perspective, I often tell clients that Second Life is at about the same stage of development that the Internet was ten years ago. And those of us who were around in the first dot.com boon will remember the keeness of the porn industry to embrace the new medium.
In 1997, the proportion of porn related Internet searches were around one in five of the total. Now, even though the volume has obviously gone up, the proportion is below one in twenty. (For an illuminating report see: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/spink/index.html)
What happened is that the medium became more mainstream, and virtual worlds will go the same way. No doubt the introduction of age verification and voice will hasten this process along even further.
2) American Apparel claims its store has been a failure and that sales have been almost non existent. This is then held up as a warning sign for brands that SL isn't the manna from heaven that marketeers believed it was. Just thinking out loud, but could it be the actual concept rather than Second Life itself that was at fault here?
Personally I feel that any brand that comes into SL to a) create a near enough carbon copy of what it does in the real world, b) replicates what other residents already do - and already do very well (in this case sell clothes) and c) Looks at this as a sales or money making venture is doomed to failure. Yes, American Apparel should be a lesson to other brands. But a lesson in how not to do it.
3) Finally I'd take issue with some of the numbers. 30,000 in at any one time is 'off peak', when the US is still asleep and Europe at work. As we know, at peak times the number on at any one time nudges 50,000. I certainly agree that Linden Labs has a lot of work to do in stemming the high rate of churn, but the numbers aren't as bad as the article makes out.
It's also worth looking at how users spend their time - and an average of 90 mins a day spent online (http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/06/offshoring.html) is phenomenal. That's an audience that no longer spends time in front of the telly, and so has less exposure to TV advertising.
There are a lot of holes in the feature and you question some of the comments made by the experts asked to talk about it. You do wonder though whether the media is starting to take more of a critical look at virtual worlds after months and months of positive, free publicity.
I just thought I would say hi to metaversed readers. I am building a community of business researchers and educators who are interested in using virtual worlds (and serious games within those worlds) for serious games. If you are interested, here is a paper describing the project:Http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=988984You can also see my recent posts at Terra Nova, a blog of academics, lawyers, gamers, and developers. Http://terranova.blogs.com/
