Choices and Viewer 2.0 Assimilation

 cc image courtesy Niklas Bildhauer

It was a day of changes today for the Second Life ecosystem.  T Linden talked fast and furiously at today's Metanomics weekly chat about some of that change.  He spent a lot of time talking about choices, and how Linden Lab believes that choice is important.

Some of those choices were clear today if you wanted to exercise your license of the services afforded to you by the virtual world Second Life.  Some were, well, not so much.

For example, if already a Second Life Resident, when you logged in today you had a choice: Accept the new Terms of Service (ToS), or don't log in.

If you were new to Second Life today (welcome) you got two choices:
1) Accept the Terms of Service (ToS) or don't log in.
2) Download and use Viewer 2.0 and only Viewer 2.0, or don't log in.

One choice no one got to exercise was well, ironically about choice.  Once you agreed the new Terms of Service, you personally also agreed to the terms of the recently released Policy on Third-Party Viewers.

Any access to or use of the Service through a software client other than the Linden Software that logs into the Servers (referred to as a "Third-Party Viewer") is subject to these Terms of Service and the terms of the Policy on Third-Party Viewers. The Policy on Third-Party Viewers provides required and prohibited functionality for Third-Party Viewers as well as other terms for those who use, develop, or distribute Third-Party Viewers; however, Linden Lab offers and supports the Service only as offered by Linden Lab and is not obligated to allow access to or use of the Service by any software or means not provided by Linden Lab. You understand and agree that Linden Lab is not responsible or liable for any aspect of the Service that is accessed or experienced using software or other means not provided by Linden Lab.

Any use of the Service, including Content on the Service, other than as specifically authorized in this Agreement, without the prior written permission of Linden Lab, is strictly prohibited and will terminate all licenses granted herein.

What's the Policy on Third-Party Viewers?  Well if you have to ask, maybe it's best just not to use one!  Essentially this means that for the majority of people, the choice to use a third party viewer (even those on the approved list) is paired with immeasurably high risk, thereby essentially nullifying that "choice". 

Sadly, this point was completely missing from (update to my initial post which wrongly attributed the post to T Linden) M Linden's blog post "Updated Second Life Terms of Service" summarizing most of the significant ToS and Privacy Policy changes.  I'm not sure why this was overlooked.  It would have been a simple paragraph to write, in fact a sentence would have sufficed.

By agreeing to the ToS you are personally accountable for the compliance of your chosen viewer with our Third-Party Viewer policy.

That resonates with the rest of the ToS emphasis of limited liability, personal accountability and choice. It's much better than the alternative:

Welcome to Viewer 2.0, you will be assimilated.

In my other capacity, I'm writing a blog post about the latest Facebook policy changes and its approach to governance.  No wonder it feels like a Monday.


Be careful out there.  See you around a grid.
Share Some Grace:

Linden Lab Leaping the Chasm?

cc photo courtesy: globevisions

This last week I read the Harvard Business School case study entitled: Linden Lab: Crossing the Chasm Rev. August 3, 2009.  If you'd like to follow along, the pdf will cost you $6.95 USD and if you have anything more than a passing fancy about the virtual world of Second Life and/or start ups in this space it's almost worth it.  I say almost because despite the report page count of 26, there are 14 pages of endnotes and poorly formed exhibits of incomplete data extracted from sources such as blog posts. That leaves you with about 6 pages of historical stage setting and 6 pages of useful information and insights into the new Linden leadership and their dilemma.

M is for Marketing

The phrase "crossing the chasm" in the HBS case study is in reference to the marketing strategy set forth by Geoffrey Moore in his book "Crossing the Chasm" published in 1991. Moore's strategy is closely tied to a technology adoption model wherein a chasm appears as a discontinuity in adoption between the early adopters (visionaries) and the early majority (pragmatists) on the way to mainstream.  

This is the same chasm that Mitch Kapor described in his 2006 SLCC address when he said:

“In particular, in the short term, right now there’s still a chasm between the power users and the clueless newbies. Those are slightly provcative terms, they’re not the best, it is just a fact, there’s still a significant number of people who come in, try it and leave. It’s not ready for prime time. I don’t believe it’s going to change overnight. It’s going to change in stages. It’s hard to know how long it’s going to take, and how long before it’s mainstream. It’s not tomorrow, it’s not next year, but it’s coming.”

This chasm as described by Mitch is the point of departure for the case study.  I decided to see if I could use it to develop a better understanding of what Linden Lab might be doing under the leadership of a long standing member of the digital marketing industry Mark Kingdon, aka M Linden.

M is for Markets
Let's go back to Moore for a minute and his marketing strategy. Moore lays out a prescribed formula for crossing the chasm that is relatively straightforward:

1. Target a specific niche market within the early majority
2. Develop a whole-product solution that addresses that market segment's specific needs 
3. Flood the market segment with an intensive marketing campaign. 

So the challenge for the Lab was/is to find that target market and hit them with everything, or they could at most hit two markets if they managed resources and priorities religiously. According to the HBS case study, the markets available to Linden Lab are: enterprise customers, educators, adult consumers or teens.

The release of Second Life Viewer 2.0 seems to fit the Moore model - it's being sold as an entirely new solution and we are certainly in the midst of a wholesale marketing campaign.  The question is, which niche target market(s) have they selected?

In mid 2009, Kingdon sounded convinced that Second Life was the killer app for business meetings, and in May the Lab rolled out Second Life Enterprise Beta, a full service behind the firewall solution for enterprise customers.  As a market segment, it's clear that a hand full of large companies have sufficient discretionary funding (solutions start at $55,000 USD) to at least sample, but I don't have details on the success of the SL Enterprise Beta to date.  The initial release was undoubtedly crippled by the lack of Shared Media recently introduced in Viewer 2.0. As an "embedded practitioner" I know first hand how difficult it is to get people to download and install simple plugins for WebEx or AdobeConnect, much less go through the standard Second Life download and orientation so it's really hard for me to imagine that this is the "beachhead" Moore suggested.

I ruled out the educators, even after the VWPBE conference and the collective "hooray" about Shared Media. I'm convinced the education market is saturated (a @fleep tweet indicated there were currently over 600 institutions in world), and the introduction of land pricing model changes combined the recent departure of John Lester / Pathfinder Linden seem to indicate that the Lab's past love affair with the edurati is in that "old married couple" stage - safe, secure, not really growing wildly and with a lot less sex.

Speaking of sex, the Lab has bent over backwards (so to speak) to isolate, cordon off and squelch any inferences that Second Life is "all about the sex" so I'm confident that the "adult -adult" niche market is out of the question.

That leaves the non- adult adult market, and teens.  I think, for now, we can rule out teens.  When asked about merging the teen grid at the VWBPE conference M Linden confirmed that a combined adult/teen was a distant future dream, but would emerge slowly through "thoughtful evolution".

We've ruled out three of the four, leaving us this ill-formed "adult market" at which Viewer 2.0 is aimed. Who, then, is that?  I like the process of elimination, so let's go there again.

The new viewer does not appear optimized for anyone wanting to host, perform or attend events of any kind.  Part of this is tied to the delay(s) of improving the overall Search experience, but that aside there is nothing in the shape of Viewer 2.0 that lends itself to finding or promoting things to do.

Viewer 2.0 brings nothing to the revenue support base, land owners and the new Linden Homes are a shot in the arm to the rental owners. Currently, land sales and ownership contributes 79% of the LL revenue - which is enormously unbalanced, ripe with risk and likely the largest motivation to find new markets.

An opportunity for growth might be the $L conversion which means new content but the new viewer does not appear to be for content creators, arguably the second most important Second Life resident behind land owners. Content creators are feeling particularly unloved these days due to continuing challenges with copyright and content theft.  Perhaps that's why we saw the heavy promotion of the SL Pro conference, with backing from Linden Lab that far exceeded any previously expressed interest in SLCC.

Is 3D Chat and Shopping Our Future?
So if Viewer 2.0 is not for finding things to do and it's not for content creators or land owners, then what's left?  Maybe I'm using the Moore model too rigidly, but is there a niche adult market out there that would serve as a suitable beachhead and give the Lab a leg up for the next wave?

My best guess is what a friend of mine likes to call "playing house with paper dolls".

This is the 3D chat or IMVU model of virtual worlds (at this moment, IMVU has 83,819 people online).  IMVU is nothing to scoff at - according to a Virtual World News post IMVU has over 35 million registered users and 100,000 registered developers - so about twice the size of Second Life and a comparable concurrency.  I even noticed the strange similarities between the IMVU and Second Life landing pages, and oddly enough the viewers.

Could "3D chat with super easy shopping" be the new beachhead to serve adult and teen markets?  If you've tried Viewer 2.0, what's your guess?

If so, it's a far cry from “connect everyone to an online world that advances the human condition.”
Share Some Grace:

Is Addiction the "Killer App"?

Maybe this post should be titled:  Random Walk with Grace so I hope you wore comfortable shoes and I do hope you'll come along.  I would love to hear your thoughts on all or any of these snippets.

Yesterday I was talking to a few colleagues about a deep concern I have, which is that thanks to the ubiquity of news and life "streams" and despite the abundance of accessible information, we may actually be starving ourselves on an addiction diet of headlines.

I won't bore you with the lengthy discussion but I was making a few points about the attention economy, what it means to be fully "engaged", why "viral" is meaningless in the gift economy, the subtleties of the virtual goods market and what it tells us about human nature and the implications of re-tweets toward avalanches of information and misinformation.  All of these things are like baking ingredients, when mixed appropriately in the right order and amounts make delightful baked goods, and when not dreadful baked anomalies.

After the conversation died down (another frustration with the new time currency of meetings that end on the hour, at which time people pack up like school children and scurry down the halls even if we've not accomplished our goals).. where was I?  Oh yes, so this concept of attention is particularly interesting to me as I am blessed on certain days with shiny thing syndrome, and I find myself running like Ms Pac Man through life and news streams, consuming as much as I can before the ghosts .. okay, you get it.

About that time, Google showed me the way to the next level.  A dreadful story with a eye popping headline from The Sun sat right there in my Google news feed for Second Life "Gamer's Tot Dies of Starvation".  The first graph of the post by Rhodri Philips (emphasis mine):

A COUPLE addicted to computer games let their real life baby starve to death while raising a virtual daughter online, cops said today.

Suddenly, my shiny thing syndrome came to a screeching halt and I was completely absorbed by this story that describes how a Korean couple literally let their child starve to death as they spent time playing an online game, where they were ironically raising a virtual child.  Tragic on so many fronts no doubt, but the story contained a most compelling paragraph (emphasis mine):

They raised an avatar baby through their profiles on a Second Life-style game called PRIUS, while their real daughter was given just one bottle of milk a day.

I knew this was a story that would flame the virtual world/MMORPG community for two reasons:  1) the on-going controversy about gaming addictions and 2) that blatantly wrong, misinformed and misleading association of PRIUS and Second Life. (For future reference, PRIUS is more like World of Warcraft than Second Life and this unfortunate association is being passed around the press even today.)

So, naturally, I tweeted. But here's what I tweeted (emphasis mine):

gracemcdunnough *shakes head* Korean baby dies as parents Kim Yoo-chul and Choi Mi-sun raise Second Life prim baby | http://bit.ly/bLxaQw

Now, I didn't mean to be so intentionally misleading, I meant to tweet this:

gracemcdunnough *shakes head* Korean baby dies as parents Kim Yoo-chul and Choi Mi-sun raise Second Life-like prim baby | http://bit.ly/bLxaQw

but in my haste to be clever, first, provocative and you know all the rest of that social currency stuff, I sent out misinformation and I didn't realize it at first but within seconds I got these:

micala @GraceMcDunnough even in an article that has *nothing* to do with SL, it's still mentioned. How about maybe the parents were just idiots.

toxicmenges @GraceMcDunnough Careful, wasn't in SL :) Was in PRIUS - We got enough bad press as it is ;)

 And I'm thinking "Uh yeah I know this, didn't you see my oh so clever ... ah, heck."  So I sent off a quick:

gracemcdunnough @toxicmenges @micala You passed :)

and then this:

gracemcdunnough UPDATE: Korean baby dies as parents Kim Yoo-chul and Choi Mi-sun raise PRIUS baby | http://bit.ly/bLxaQw

and then I had a quick exchange with @slhamlet all within two minutes of the initial tweet.  

So my communication crisis was mostly adverted in a manner of a few minutes but only because I was paying attention and my thoughts drifted back to my original discussion and to another similar twitter exchange. In February this tweet from M Linden caught my eye:

mlindenSL http://bit.ly/bpE4cP #SL #SecondLife #Avatar -- Love the SL>RL Fashion connection!!

I have a high fascination for real to virtual world cross over so I went find out more about this story about the triumphant the return of Anne-Sofie to the fashion world.  From the ELLE-UK post:

...the Swedish designer returned with a collection inspired by Second Life and an avatar based on herself 'but improved by buying the wak of Angelina Jolie'.

So I asked myself the first question: Who is Anne Sofie and do I care? Answer: Some fashion diva, and not really.  Then the next question: What about her Second Life experience influenced her designs?  That answer was worth some research and in doing so I came up with this quote from The Independent:

Identity and deceit is a recurring theme and this season, for her first show in a year, Back’s inspiration comes from the online game Second Life, in which players create their own avatar. Back avatar is complete in its verisimilitude, if not in its career. “I make a living out of stripping there – it’s really easy money,” she quips. “Second Life is quite a shitty, slow game where nothing much happens, but people do make an effort with clothes, hair and make-up. The weird thing is, you have the chance to really create something fantastic – you know, with rabbit ears or you could be green. But most people want to look like Katie Price and Peter Andre, and wear clothes like people on Big Brother. It’s even more conformist than real life.”

and my subsequent tweet:

gracemcdunnough Ann-Sofie returns: Second Life is quite a shitty, slow game where nothing much happens.. http://bit.ly/9GsvIa

Maybe nothing *was* happening when Ann-Sofie was around but all that's about to change with the advent of the Second Life Viewer 2.0 Shared Media feature.  Now you can exploit this capability so that you stay fully immersed in world longer and for more noble causes.  Want to read, comment or write blog post, tweet, watch a film - now you can all from the comfort of the Second Life "browser", er viewer.

Then I started wondering if fashionistas were prowling virtual farms in FarmVille.  Will we see exciting new overall and straw hat fashion statements cruising the catwalks?

You must be wondering where I'm going with this, and so was I until it hit me this morning.  Are we building ourselves the ultimate addictions?

Why do we Second Life Residents defend it so boldly when it's carelessly mentioned in the press? Do we simply have the vision for what might be and are defending that bright future, or are we blinded by our own addictions?


It's easy to scoff at the Korean couple.  Who lets their real life suffer so tragically because of an online game?   


We all know Anne-Sofie just didn't "get" Second Life, or did she?

We all think Shared Media will revolutionize Second Life in the best possible ways, don't we?

Are we already at risk of addiciton? Care to take a short quiz to find out?

Before you take the quiz, a few disclaimers are in order.

1) This quiz is meant to drive thought and/or entertain.  It is not a diagnosis tool. It's not science, this is more like art. I have no professional training in anything remotely related to psychology short my college work. I found the survey assessment below online here:  http://psychcentral.com/quizzes/netaddiction.htm and I changed references from the Internet to Second Life.  From that site:  Use this brief screening measure to help you determine if you might need to see a mental health or other social services professional to help you successfully deal with "Internet addiction (Second Life)." 

2) I wasn't the first to suggest this, I found that Landsend Korobase has a great post about Second Life addiction and did this very assessment back in 2009.





3) This is a Google form that collects no information other than your responses and it will not return a "score", it will merely tally the cumulative marks from everyone. 

4) If you want your score, keep track of your answers and use this point system 0=never, 1=sometimes, 2=often.  The scoring model says for scores >30 addiction is likely, 29-20 addiction is possible, 19-15 bordeline, 14-0 no addiction.

5) I don't know what I'll do with the submitted form data yet, I may try to shape it into an art piece in Second Life, or maybe I'll just post it using Shared Media. ;-)

6) Please don't spam this form. No one will notice or love you if you do and I'll just have to take it down.

So, what do you think - have we finally discovered the "killer app"?

Share Some Grace: