I spoke with an interesting group of people over at Intel yesterday about the future of virtual worlds. One of the things we touched on was the concept of simplicity and how it might be the key to eventual mass adoption. I've thought about it even more since speaking, and wanted to follow up with a few thoughts here, and open the conversation to a wider audience.
Virtual worlds are complicated. Prohibitively complicated. The initial learning curve is so great in Second Life for example, that most people don't stay. It's just too hard. Some other worlds are easier. Kaneva for example is pretty simple. You can be walking around and talking to people in 2 or 3 minutes. The trade off is that your avatar is pretty simple also. In fact Kaneva avatars pale in comparison to Second Life ones. This isn't important though. Not in the context of adoption and retention rates it isn't. It could be a major deciding factor in how the non-Second-Life Social Virtual Worlds will shape up next year, and even be the defining characteristic of a worthwhile contender for the virtual worlds throne that Linden Lab's creation occupies now.
A few examples
Put virtual worlds to one side just for a moment and contemplate the following list:
- Flickr tipped photo sharing when they made it simple
- Wordpress and Six Apart tipped blogging when they made it simple
- Google destroyed it's competition when they made Search simple
- The iPod is the MP3 player, other brands are insignificant
- Twitter tipped mobile life logging when it made it simple
- YouTube tipped video sharing when they made it simple
The points themselves are simplistic, but you'll see what I mean I'm sure.
So the question is...
Who will make virtual worlds simple in 2008? How will it be done? What steps do virtual worlds vendors need to take in order to make this whole concept simple?
Let me know what you think...
