The Second Life Why Stories

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This long weekend could not have been more timely.  I needed a refresh and while Saturday was framed by 6am and 6pm Grace O'clocks, I've had the luxury of time to explore artists markets, movies, research papers and books. Now it's Monday and I need to turn my attention to Three Thanks - right after I get this post out of my head.

One book I finished was Simon Sinek's "Start With Why". I ran across Simon's TED Talk "How Great Leaders Inspire Action" (also the subtitle to his book) and was left wanting more, so I grabbed a copy of his book. 

Unless you are seriously into marketing texts, I think Simon's TED talk is just enough to get the main point across which is an elegant idea that Simon calls his "discovery".  Simon embodies his discovery in what he calls the The Golden Circle. It's a simple concentric circle model with WHY at the center, surrounded by HOW and WHAT.

He describes the implications as this:

Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows WHAT they do, 100 percent. Some know HOW they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know WHY they do what they do. And by "WHY" I don't mean "to make a profit." That's a result. It's always a result. By "WHY" I mean: what's your purpose? What's your cause? What's your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care? 

Simon predominantly uses three case studies to demonstrate how the idea of WHY is a differentiator for success: 1) why Apple has become a predominant technology company, 2) why the Wright brothers succeeded despite lack of funds, and 3) why Martin Luther King inspired the nation not with what should be done, but with the why of his beliefs.

He argues that organizations that begin with a strong sense of WHY and keep themselves centered there are far more effective that those that focus on WHAT they do or HOW they do it.

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Second Life Retention Recipe: Chat More

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Chun-Yuen Teng and Lada A. Adamic from the School of Information at the University of Michigan have just published some interesting research on user retention in the virtual world Second Life ®.

The researchers observed that a high percentage (95.4%) of users who had made some financial investment in SL were likely to remain.  From there, they set out to determine which factors were the best predictors of retention. The findings are quite interesting and I'll summarize, but please read the detailed report for the analysis.

Linden Lab provided the research team a dataset on user activity including snapshots of the social network, group affiliations, as well as summary interaction data such as first and most recent login, user-to-user transactions and pairwise chat frequencies. The researchers focused on the slice of data spanning May-June 2009 and evaluated four different facets of the user experience: usage (time spent), networking (number of contacts, groups and social cohesion), interactions (frequency and regularity), and financial transactions (selling and buying).

1) On Usage
The total length of time spent in SL was not a significant predictor, however the intensity (total time spent in world) was a strong predictor.

2) On Networking
While all parameters of networking (# friends, # active friends, % active friends, clustering, # groups, group overlaps) were highly correlated with retention, the number of raw contacts and groups, were key to identifying which users stay. The diversity of those contacts was a positive predictor but not a strong correlation.

3) On Interactions
For this I will quote directly from the report:

We observe that almost all chat parameters are more predictive that the static network measures above.  Furthermore, one need not resort to complex metrics because the best predictions are also the simplest, e.g. the number of chat partners (not necessarily friends), or the number of days on which the user chatted.

In other words, talking with people matters.

4) On Financial Transactions
Here, the researchers looked at data on purchases, sales, and transfer of goods as well as proximity within the social graph.  The results indicated that while economic activity was correlated with retention, it was less so than chat.  Spending money was more highly correlated than making money.  Having a high proportion of free transactions was highly predictive. Profits did not improve the predictions of whether a user would stay.  The amount of money paid to Linden Lab versus other users was only weakly predictive.


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Virtual World Views

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For me, the most compelling attribute of a virtual world like Second Life ® is the synchronicity of presence, place, and people that allows you to have a shared experience. One might argue that shared experiences are the underlying human engine that powers much of the Social Web - online shared experiences allow us to feel deeply connected despite whatever boundaries the physical world might present. Shared experiences can be most powerful when people share some resonance of situation such as cancer, or a shared belief, or culture. Online, the vehicles that enable shared experiences can be artfully designed and offline, businesses (such as Starbucks) can leverage the power of experience to lucrative ends. 

As I'm still exploring the edges of this concept of "a Second Life Culture" one thing has struck me, and that is how the very same experience can be perceived so differently by individuals. The unscripted nature of Second Life, the lack of structure and goals as it were, affords the abundance of world views. These world views are self-constructed and are based on either our past experiences or our vision of what the world should be; they become the lens through which we evaluate our virtual existence.

If you understand how someone came to discover Second Life, you may have some insight into their initial world view.  When a gamer wanders into Second Life they may start to evaluate the experience with a few questions:  What do I do? How do I level up?  What are the goals?  These are perfectly valid questions for a gamer to ask; they frame the essence of a gamer's world view.  

So when Scott Carmichael posts a great link bait headline "Why Second Life Will (& Has To) Die" the first clue to his world view is that the blog is boldly titled Scott Carmichael's Gaming Blog. His world view is largely if not completely framed by gaming and furthermore he's convinced that his view is the majority view. From the comments he notes (emphasis mine):

To clarify once again (in what will probably be my last comment on the post), here are the problems with Second life:

#1) It has no purpose. It’s a sandbox with no objectives for users. And 99% of internet users NEED a reason to use something if a company expects them to do so. Right now, SL offers no significant benefit over traditional email/chat/social networking/VOIP/etc. sites to facilitate communication/interaction.

#2) The guy in charge of SL thinks (as recently as a couple months ago when interviewed by Robert Scoble) that SL is actually doing well and on the right track and doesn’t plan to overhaul one iota of SL. From what I’m understanding, he — and the users right now — seem perfectly content to leave SL as-is. A niche program/site/service full of elitist, extreme-minority 3D modeling/scripting/animating-savvy users.

#3) If it ever wants to TRULY be a REAL, TRUE virtual world that could reach the level of popularity and usage the SL creators probably originally envisioned, they have to fundamentally change the way the world and its users operate. So, in effect, that would mean killing off the current version of Second Life. Since that most likely isn’t going to happen (that would mean admitting what SL has been since the beginning was a failure), SL is simply doomed to die and fade to irrelevance over the next couple of years (for the most part it already has).

Some of Scott's observations are intriguing, but when bundled up and justified in the cloak of a gamer world view, it's tough to see even the bright spots unless of course, you are part of Scott's 99%.  It's also difficult for Scott to see any other point of view than his own when it comes to Second Life.

What this means is that Scott and I may not have a happy shared experience in Second Life at all - even if we are at precisely the same virtual place, at the same time. While I may revel in the beauty of the place, he may be equally annoyed at the lack of goals or direction. What I might see as an intriguing emergent economy, he may view as an unfair or unbalanced playing field.

Scott has just one world view among many and in Second Life there are far more, certainly more than Henrik Bennetsen initially outlined in "Augmentation vs Immersion".  Some are based on past virtual experiences such as TheSims Online or There.com, some on the notion of seeing Second Life as a "platform" verus a "world" (more on this in a later post) and still some are blank slates until people spend more than a few hours in world - this is why the poorly named "first hour" user experience is so critical.

One thing is for certain, your world view can have a direct effect on whether your Second Life experience is a happy one.

So the natural question is: Is there a way to make us all "happy" or at least "happier"?  Maybe not, but there are a few clues about the implications of shared experiences and how Linden Lab might help themselves at least for the existing non ex-user base.

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Chicken One Day, Feathers the Next

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Recently, Hamlet Au posted a blog entitled "Avian Fever: Virtual Chickens (Briefly) Added 60K Paying Users To Second Life's Economy!" in which he highlighted an interesting footnote to the latest Linden Lab economic report as he quotes:

The June 2009 spike is correlated to the dramatic rise in popularity of the Sion Chicken in that month. 

I couldn't see a spike in June but rather in July, thanks to the on-going and heroic efforts of Tyche Sheperd and the "Total Customers Spending Money In-World" graph, there was clearly a jump in July followed by an almost equal decline in August. So, indeed something "blipped" on the Second Life economy and I suppose only Linden Lab has the data insider advantage to note the distinction between chicken-induced correlation or causation.

Economics aside, the story of the sionChickens developed by the enterprising Second Life Resident Sion Zaius is equally fascinating when viewed through the lens of collision between Sion's new technology and that of the Second Life socio-cultural norms.

I was a chicken-owner and I was crushed by a few of these collisions myself. When I became a bunny owner recently, I recounted the myriad of issues I experienced with the sionChickens.  Can they die? Can someone else kill them? How long do they live? Are they lagtastic? Do they breed? How much does it cost to feed them? These questions might seem strange to someone who missed the sionChicken era.

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Zombie Attack

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Please pardon the dust.  I've been doing a little late Spring cleaning on the blog.

If you are looking for your comments that have gone missing, Disqus is currently holding them hostage (quoting some kind of Zombie labor laws).

Don't fret, we are continuing our negotiations and regular banter may resume shortly.

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Search for A Second Life Culture or Omphaloskepsis

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I'm going to continue my journey for "a" Second Life® culture and risk an omphaloskepsis outbreak. If you've found your way here from other places, welcome. This is my third post in a series on "The Search for A Culture in Second Life". You may want to read the first and second posts.

This week a quote trickled through my twitter feed from @MeganMurray 7:29AM May 6th:

I sometimes think we talk abt tools and metrics more because they are easier to grasp & less combustible than talking about being human.

I agree. This entire discussion of culture - virtual or otherwise - is messy stuff.

Questions, presumptions and world views - are we just navel gazing?

More than one person has asked me why I started this particular set of posts; some ask from curiosity, some with a taint of suspicion. Some have gone so far as to attack me personally, and some suggest that I'm wasting my time that could otherwise be spent on more important (albeit undefined) endeavors. Still others encourage me quietly from the sidelines.

I wasted a lot of time agonizing over answers and second-guessing myself but I've come out on the other side still believing one thing with certainty: There are no right or wrong answers, there are merely more questions. And I do believe that it's our ability to ask questions, and our willingness to try to answer them - each in our own way - that matters. Questions drive progress and innovation. On the flip side, unspoken presumptions and assumptions thwart it.


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