To master the game of WoW requires hundreds and hundreds of hours of gameplay, learning all kinds of really arcane information and engaging in combat and skilling up characters, etc. It is very controlled, rote, hierarchical society that incites and indulges in violence, i.e. ganking newbs.

SL isn’t anything remotely like that. Within the first hour, you can put on an outfit, fly around and talk. You are not required to “go do something” or “skill up” or learn a skill or start playing something in order to

The only reason WoW seems light and fun to you by comparison is because you’re a male gamer and have mastered a huge wad of wargaming skills since a tender age. But most people aren’t male gamers; even males aren’t gamers. SL works better for them precisely because it has none of that constant intense pressure to skill up, fight, play a game, get killed, recover, etc. It’s nothing like that, as it is an openended world.

So you could do nothing and just listen to music and talk or gradually you could learn to build something and even script animated things — or just buy prefabs and socialize or make a business.

Who needs open APIS? This notion of the “need” for open APIS comes from…those widgeteers who make a living hustling them. The rest of us have no objective need for them. We take phone software, virtual world software, game software “as is” without crying and whining that it isn’t opensourced, jailbroken, reverse-engineered, and devalued by being made available for…widgeteers who need to hack at it to sell us some *other* game or thingie on facebook or whatever. This notion of the “need” for “openness” is a total crock, and a total concoction coming straight out of Silicon Valley and its networks of geeks — and it’s a minority interest that we don’t all need to serve.

Far from being “platform agnostic” you are a platform zealot — a dyed-in-the-wool California ideological geek who “needs” technology to be a certain way because you have a vested interest in making your living at it *being that way*.

The rest of us don’t have that felt need, Chris.

As for “powerful machines” on SL, I don’t see that this doesn’t apply much more to games, which require a hell of a lot more firepower. You are also out of date on this. Today, I really can go into Best Buy and spend $900 and get a machine that plays SL completely fine — that wasn’t the case 5 years ago. Graphics cards have gotten better, cheaper, and more dispersed than they were 5 or 10 or even 2 years ago.

OK, I read your list and I think this must be opposite day because it IS a HUGE download, it does require a geekiness to do it well and to get why it is important, it does require, if you want to suck the marrow out of second life, the ability to script or the desire to spend some money on scripting…

I hate to say it that you were not discussing Second Life in your list, you were describing XBOX 360, Playstation 3, or even the Wii. You are talking WoW or Ultima Online, but I don’t think you’re speaking about Second Life, which is ponderous and requires quite a lot of Internet savvy.

The software often requires updates, downloads, a very powerful machine, quite a lot of bandwidth, headsets, and so forth.

In my comparison, Second Life is heavy, lacks portability, lacks mobile integration, lacks an open API (not an open system, and open API), and so forth.

Finally, I didn’t mean to be snarky but all of you guys have completely misread me and misinterpreted me and you kind of remind me of my good ole Whale Qaeda:

http://chrisabraham.com/2008/03/09/whale-qaeda/

:)

Actually, I’m one of Second Life’s biggest critics. I think if you’re going to criticize any virtual world, however, you can do it from a far more sophisticated and informed stance than you are. Basically, here’s what you’re saying: “PR agencies and metaversal ‘solutions providers’ who tried to exploit SL for their fearful corporate clients failed miserably” — because that’s essentially what the 2006/2007 hype phase is about, not even corporations per se, who didn’t in fact themselves engage with the software or the world or the community with their own IT or creative teams, but instead, relied on their traditional PR agencies, and their hired hands from the metaversal sheraps, to try to make a claim that the sagging advertising industry, in a panic as newspapers and magazines and even TV ads died or declined, could substitute this gap with virtual worlds.

It couldn’t so readily, because obviously virtual worlds are not push media or one-to-many media, and rely on many-to-many and user-generated-content and both faster and slower forms of communication that mass media because they are interactive and viral. Twitter is in fact the same thing — what we are seeing is people like Scoble trying to continue to use it as mass media, like a radio station with 70,000 listeners to a specific niche show in one community, although Scoble exerts enormous effort to try to make this a call-in radio show and takes a lot of calls.

So, Jason, let me get this straight then: you viewed SL through the keyhole of your interviews of *one company* in SL for a…college textbook. Do you think that represents any kind of scholarly sample?

Also, you viewed it from the position of putting “CEO” in front of your name for your company. How many people are in this business, and what is the volume of sales per year and revenue? And you described yourself as an “author”. Is this a recognized commercial publishing house or a self-publishing venture?

Whose playing in the virtual reality here?!

I’m not “crazed” and “passionate” about Second Life, I’m simply an early adapter, and a very critical one at that. I’m hugely skeptical of all the artifacts of Silicon Valley, starting with the Gartner Hype Cycle which all tech press and bloggers heavily rely on as “the truth” but isn’t any more scientific or peer-reviewed or proven across time than any other artifact of Silicon Valley hucksterism. Perhaps some parts of the Internet grow more slowly, grow with different cycles, have different properties as human enterprises than this reductivist but hugely popular device can ever predict. It’s just one of many memes that Silicon Valley bloggers arm themselves in their own crazed and passionate rants about their own unsubtantiated claims about technology.

I have my own theories for the rabid cynicism, scorn and hatred that tekkies heap upon Second Life:

o it’s software that does not require a geek class to operate it, and pretty much anyone can learn to use it after some orientation, which they can usually get from their peers, or on their own, without trained consultants

o it’s software that ordinary people can use to monetarize their time on the Internet without geeks, trained consultants, solutions providers, etc. It is a very low barrier to commerce, especially for people outside the wealthy industrialized West.

o it enables mass culture, but with an interactive slant, which elitists in the IT industry scorn and hate as inferior, in part because that mass culture signifies a growing adaptation to technology that doesn’t require them

o it provides an alternative, both in terms of entertainment and education, to other mass forms of entertainment controlled by established industries, namely Hollywood, Madison Avenue, TV, massive online games like World of Warcraft.

Second Life is part of a growing iteration of the Internet that enables a lot more people to stop queuing up and waiting for the webmaster, to stop having to call the Geek Squad, to stop having to rely heavily for training and maintenance on tekkies. And that infuriates them and challenges them so profoundly that they lash back with a largely unconscious hatred.

I’m not entirely sure what “no parity or behavior requirement in Twitter” means, but I’m sure it’s true.

I’m not entirely sure where all this discussion leads us, to be honest. Because I’m a big fan of Twitter, just as I’m a big fan of virtual environments. Our use of both technologies is integrative – you can send tweets TO Immersive Workspaces and you can send them out; our show, Metanomics, is broadcast from within a virtual environment, can be seen on the Web, and is promoted and discussed via Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

My post “Can virtual worlds save social media” is meant to (slightly provocatively) point out that virtual worlds are part of a spectrum of communication tools from, on the one hand, persistent, information-rich spaces in which you can communicate using multiple modalities (text, private text, voice) and have a sense of presence to, on the other hand, social media such as Twitter where you can participate in real time information flow, connect easily with other people, and spread memes or whatever.

At the end of the day, therefore, it seems to me that the issue with “hype” is that maybe, just maybe, the media are struggling to make sense of transformative change – change that is being facilitated by the ‘always on’ information and social network stream of twitter, and change that is being facilitated by the geography-busting presence and deep interactions afforded by the “heavier” applications like Second Life (or, for that matter, games or ‘heavy’ movie downloads or whatever).

The hype is a way to try to latch on to something, anything, that will help to articulate the sea change that continues in society – the kind of sea change that will upend more industries than it has already, will lead to more social change than it has already facilitated, and will lead to further shifts in the nexus of political and cultural power. Twitter is a good way to describe that sea change today – it’s new, we can talk about Iran or #tylenol or whatever, and yesterday it was SL….both were convenient “at hand” metaphors for a more profound change than either metaphor can fully handle.

Maybe SL was all hype and no substance. I don’t believe so – I work across media, I’m relatively new to “virtuality”, but my clients are understanding the value proposition and they’re buying, just as new users are buying.

And maybe Twitter is substance behind the hype, which doesn’t mean it also won’t face a trough of disillusionment before it rights itself and settles into long-term relevance.

But what I do NOT think is hype is change, and what that change means – and if the media keeps using these ‘new shiny things’ as a stand-in for trying to explain how significant these forces are, then let them – because at the end of the day SL or Twitter may come and go, but the transformative trends upon which they’re based are NOT going to disappear.

Twitter works excellently as a news ticker, as an RSS reader substitute, as yet another way to see what your favorite celebrity is up to, as another way to keep up with your brave friends even if you’re too shy or too private to feed in. Twitter is not BitTorrent, where one needs to seed files in order to achieve the sort of status for full access. There is no parity or behavior requirement in Twitter.

Like I suggested in my post on AdAge, the platform is neutral, light, and almost undefined. More like the cardboard box than the toy.

In that case, the “7% of the Twitter community fuel the entire conversation,” can very well be true. In fact, it took me over eight months after I joined Twitter on January 06, 2007 to sort myself out, to find friends who I could could engage with, and to get my sea legs.

Personally, I am going to be installing Laconi.ca for my company so that we can start “tweeting” into our own database so that if Twitter ever failed, I would have a certain level of access to our collective tweets.

I will address the rest of your comment in a little while — I need to think more. I am much obliged to you for your thoughtful comments and your openness to having this conversation without being a troll at all.

In any case, yes, the hype dropped – it went from the cover of Business Week and breathless “3D Internet Is Going to Be Everywhere” to coverage in the New York Times or the Guardian or other major outlets as, well, as reporting rather than hype – in-depth articles on artists in SL, or virtual architecture for example (I can send you links if you like). In other words, sane “this is what’s happening” coverage rather than “wow the world has changed forever” coverage (which is what I’d describe as the current Twitter meme).

But let’s look at some stats because I think the “niche” argument goes both ways (I’ll reference this article .. http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/ although there are other comparable ones, I saw one in HBR with a similar take):

- There are roughly 11.5 million Twitter accounts
- Of those, 85% post less than one Tweet per day
- That makes, roughly, 1,700,000 who Tweet per day
- 21% of them have never ‘Tweeted’ (that would be like, in SL, not logging back in I suppose)
- But the killer, of course, is that 5% of the users account for 75% of all activity.

5% of the users is about 575,000 users.

Now, isn’t it odd – because in May 2009 there were 656,000 active Second Life users who spent 43 million hours in-world. They spent an average of 42.65 hours per month and generated $50,000,000 in user-to-user transactions.

Now look, I’m not arguing that Twitter isn’t growing, but I am arguing that where things stand right now, the two platforms actually have fairly similar levels of activity, although I haven’t seen any statistics that talk about how people have been able to monetize Twitter (I know, it’s not about the money, it’s about real time news and opinion and all that…but SL isn’t just about escapism, futurism or non-profits either – let me give you a tour of Immersive Workspaces some time, our enterprise solution that is being picked up by pharma, government and other enterprise for serious and wide-ranging uses).

As SL continues to advance, it is also specifically doing so with a strategy for including Web-based access to the social communities that are deeply engaged because there is a platform with a vibrant user economy, there is art, there is collaboration, there are companies using it and schools and all those icky MUD and MOO types.

Specifically, Linden Lab is continuing to launch applications that extend its reach to the Web including a Web-based dashboard, communication tools that let you connect with people whether you’re logged in or not, avatar phone numbers, and integration with other social media.

By the way, did you know that Second Life is second to Skype for Internet-based voice? A billion hours of voice are logged through SL every month. This makes SL the second largest VOIP provider in the world. I wonder how “MUD-like” that makes it?

So look, Chris – your humble opinion is fine. But I’m not so sure its particularly factual. The main stream media is doing just fine where SL is concerned – the sort of regular positive coverage that you’d expect from, I don’t know, the Internet in general maybe – coverage that treats it like a platform rather than something new and shiny.

And as for the big brands – the consumer-facing stuff never belonged in SL in the first place, and I’d argue that they doesn’t belong on Twitter either (for the most part, and mostly because they won’t “get it” just as they didn’t get SL, brands are always last to understand how it all works) but the ironic thing is (and this may also become true of Twitter one day) that SL is still being used by companies WITH brands, it’s just that they’re using it for collaborative purposes with stakeholders and internal teams and are keeping a far lower profile than yesteryear with all their breathless press releases about launching stores in SL, much like the breathless PR today about your phone company opening a Twitter stream or whatever.

In any case, you may have written off SL, it may be this little niche thing that isn’t worth paying attention to other than as a source of lessons for a micro-blogging application. In which case – how about we meet again here in 12 months and we’ll see how we’re each doing? What do you say?

And if Twitter is still riding the upper end of the hype wave I’ll blog a big “Chris was right” thing, and if SL is continuing to grow because it’s a valid business model with positive mainstream coverage and an active user community you do the same. :)

Your argument about hype is, well, poorly argued and reasoned. If we’re talking about hype (which is what you claim to be doing), then what we’re talking about is the media’s tendency to cotton on to the “next big thing” and to inflate it with promise. I’d argue that the question about hype is the following:

- First, is the hype warranted? Is it over-inflating the promise of something, or is it accurate? In the case of Second Life, much of the hype surrounded the fact that it was a platform that had a robust economy based on user-generated content. This led to the assumption, by brands, by Ad Age columnists, by agencies – that because it had a robust user-generated economy, that it was de facto a mass market platform that big brands would benefit from becoming involved in.

The hype about a user-generated economy, it turns out, was NOT over-inflated. In fact, that very economy continues to grow, user-to-user transactions continue to expand, and while no one is writing about it anymore, some of those users are making well into the 7 figures.

That economy is further supported by the enterprise, schools, governments, cause marketers and others who use SL. That economy is reflected in the profits at Linden Lab, the number of “islands” (servers) that have been deployed, and the increase in user concurrency.

As for premium accounts, they’re a reflection of – well, of nothing. They’ve basically been nerfed – the only reason you need a premium account is to buy land. Buy mainland to be exact. Problem is, you can also RENT land. So there’s no incentive or reason to have a premium account and Linden Lab does quite fine without them thanks very much.

So your choice of an illustrative graph is another demonstration of how little you’re aware of what’s driving SL growth.

(For more on this, why don’t you watch Metanomics…Mark Kingdon was interviewed, and puts most of your myths and fallacies to rest.)

http://www.metanomics.net/show/setting_the_stage_in_conversation_with_mark_kingdon/

Oh, and because I don’t want to be ‘anti-textual’, don’t worry there’s a transcript.

OK…so…the media hyped up user generated content, and it turns out that the hype was right – having a platform where individual users can make money DOES lead to growth and it DOES lead to profit for the platform owners.

The problem is, you SAY you’re talking about the HYPE but then you go on to compare the platforms. On which point you’ve probably read my blog on the topic so I’ll leave it at that – but basically, what a joke of a comparison.

The issue with hype is that it’s HYPE. Sure, Twitter might have a more successful hype bubble, but I think that it’s not the bubble you’re worried about, it whether the hype is based on anything factual, which is where you get to the rather confusing platform comparison. But since we’re still on the hype topic, the question I think is this: what IS the Twitter hype? What is it based on? Does Twitter actually deliver that? What parts of the hype are inflated? And finally, and most importantly….how will that hype be misconstrued by advertising and other types, just as the SL hype was misconstrued by some of the ad agencies to paint a picture of successful car franchises in SL or whatever?

In SL – the hype – “oh! everyone needs to be here! We’ll be selling shoes from inside a virtual world!” was the way that the hype was misconstrued.

What’s the equivalent with Twitter? Who will misconstrue it? How will that lead to high profile investment failures? Or who will try to change the world with Twitter only to discover that Twitter is, well, Twitter….and it has a bunch of smart people using it and it’s light and it’s cute but it’s, well…Twitter?

In any case, SL, I believe, ended up being exactly what it said it was: a platform that allowed user generated content with IP ownership, leading to a robust in-world economy and the ability for multiple stakeholders to tap into that user content to create an exceptionally broad range of activities. It continues to grow and be successful because of this.

Will Twitter end up being the same? Which really leads to the more fundamental question – not how light it is, nor how easy to use and learn….but what IS it really, and will it always be able to deliver on that promise?