stats

Christian Renaud of Cisco Systems called for a little honesty in statistics reporting on the Virtual Worlds Blog today. While nobody is necessarily falsifying numbers, there's always a certain amount of coaching of the truth to make things seem more favorable than they really are. "Since this is still an early market without a common language, each company is reporting whatever statistics make their platform look more attractive," says Renaud. At present if one were to add together the reported subscriber base of the 44 "top" virtual worlds, you would total 465,003,915 people. The population of Canada, the US and Mexico together is about 443,230,979.

Renaud sees a need for two things: a basic taxonomy for virtual worlds, and a common market index.

Taxonomy is important because when we say "virtual worlds", we could be talking about anything. We might be talking about a chat interface with avatars, or a world simulation without avatars, or any number of things in between. Are we talking about a 3D or 2D environment? How do MMORPG's fit in? These are pretty basic questions, but if there aren't clear answers then the term "virtual world" falls apart.

A common market index naturally follows. This would involve working out a common set of metrics across all virtual worlds that they would all apply the same way. From this worlds can be compared and successes can be measured more easily. Renaud points out that more traditional advertisers are entering the virtual arena and this is the kind of metric they are keenly interested in.

The end result is a common understanding of what works and what doesn't so that we can get down to the business of properly cross-breeding these worlds. We may end up with fewer platforms, but they'll contain the best possible combination of attributes from their progenitors. The added benefit is that companies new to virtual worlds will be able to make long-term investments without as much concern over the potential demise of the platform they're investing in.

Talk of attention data has been a hot topic among web mucky mucks for some years now, though as of yet, not much has been done other than talk. Attention data for those that are forgivably behind the curve here, is simply information about what you're doing, how you're doing it, and how long you've been doing it. For example, you might record that you spent an hour reading feeds in Google Reader this morning, which of them you opened, how long you spent reading each one and then go on to record that you spent 10mins talking in IM with a friend. You might go as far as to record what you spoke about, and if you were busy doing other things at the same time as that conversation. Attention, with me? Ok good. So, IAN, a German advertising company operating on over 50 islands within Second Life and already working on behavioral targeting projects, are developing a set of tools to record attention in the Metaverse, with the purpose of anonymizing that data, and buying it back off of residents to better tune advertisements inworld.

Sound a bit scary? It is. The thing about attention, and behavior is that in order to be effective, it has to be very personal. Not everyone is comfortable having their behavior recorded, and that's probably the biggest stumbling block for what could be a killer personalization structure that could theoretically span the Metaverse, the Web, and everything you do on your computer, or even cell phone. The benefits of such a system could be massive, in fact they could change the way we live, work and play forever, but as of yet, it's still all a lot of hot air and breathless chatter from the muckies.

Why would it benefit you? Imagine being able to export your attention data from your browser, and build an "attention profile" that could in turn be imported into Second Life for example. That data could be used to help you find information relevant to your interests, meet others with similar profiles, tune advertisements so they actually gave you information you wanted to receive, anything.. The possibilities are endless. And this is what IAN are working toward. Sebastian Kupers emailed me to say that his firm had joined the APML working group (Attention Profiling Markup Language) and were actively trying to bring attention data tools to the Metaverse, as well as add a voice from the 3D web to the group. Though the plan is ambitious, it's not the technical implementation that's the issue, most of that is fairly simple, it's trust that poses the biggest obstacle. Second Life does not support cookies, meaning that any data, or attention profiles built for individuals would have to be stored on an IAN database, which is far from ideal. Trustworthy, nice folks though they may be, many people would be a little spooked by the idea I thnk, and certainly Sebastian seems to be well aware of this.

Despite trust issues, technological hurdles and implementation challenges though, the project is a worthy one I think. Attention profiling will eventually make all of our online lives much more productive and pleasurable, and in the Metaverse, the project has to start somewhere. I have to yet again wonder though, that would a wearable HUD, (as would almost certaily be the way to deploy such tools) be effective? Integration into the viewer with an opt-in system for recording and publishing would seem a more effective way to record attention data, and a better way to aggregate it.

Last week I mentioned that Alidar Moxie of Mechanized Life would be releasing an advanced statistics tool for Second Life based on her popular RSS Sensor product. That tool is now available, and is called, imaginatively.. StatsCollector. The cool thing about StatsCollector is that not only can you get visitor statistics for you land such as visitor counts, names, repeats etc, but you can also get payment details (if they have a credit card on file), avatar age and aggregate data such as busiest week, time of day and more.

You can find the StatsCollector at the Mechlife Store [SLUrl] in Antibes priced at $1000L

A new site for data miners and virtual world enthusiasts has just launched. MMOGData.com is an ever-growing catalog of all types of virtual worlds that tracks revenue models, subscribers, genres, ads, and more. The specific criteria are sure to change over time as this has just launched.

This comes just as 57 Miles and I were discussing doing the very same thing at Metaversed, but it looks like Vortal (aka Phil White) beat us to the punch. Vortal comes to us from his online gaming services company PSFEI, whose website keeps locking up my browser so use a bit of caution there...

Something that's heard over and over again in Second Life when talking to companies and businesses about their virtual world operations is a desire for far, far better visitor statistics to be made available. For right now, Linden Lab, makers of the 3D Metaverse, don't provide much in the way of stats, but Mechanized Life, a company working with various web api's to create mashups and integration apps for Second Life, hope to fill that need in the near future.

I was fortunate enough to get a sneek preview of a very early beta for advanced reporting on Mech Life's RSS Sensor app. The new system was able to tell me details about who visited on what days of the week, visits by age, visits by payment status and the top visiting avatars to a region.

Though Alidar Moxie, who runs Mech Life says there is much work to do on the product as of yet, and pricing has yet to be finalized, it looks promising, and I can see a whole stack of companies subscribing to such service. More on this as it develops.