Pivoting to Pockets

Pocket Legends - A MMOG in your pocket

This past week Avatar Reality, the makers of the virtual world Blue Mars, recently announced that they would be restructuring the company to focus on iOS mobile platforms which included a significant staff reduction up to and including CEO Jim Sink. There was deliberation and discussion about why the company failed to be a "Second Life killer", but we are living in times of rapid change - one in which he who pivots best, wins.

Blue Mars - We'll Get Your Second Life Right
Lauded as a premium 3D social virtual world, the breath-taking imagery released in the early phases of Blue Mars was hard to resist. It was 2008 and the eye candy driven by the CryTEK engine was making Second Life look like a virtual slum.  But Blue Mars promised more; in fact the Avatar Reality team poked at some of the most pernicious Second Life flaws and thorns - content protection, content creator relationships, event scale, and a revenue shared marketplace.

Even with all of this, Blue Mars seemed more like Mars - generally absent of people and without significant growth either as a platform or as a world. I didn't spend much time in Blue Mars - as much as there was to see, there wasn't much to do. In my mind, it was doomed to become an enormous 3D museum.

Time to Pivot
Steven Gary Blank's book The Four Steps to the Epiphany opens with a classic quote from Joseph Campell and Hero with a Thousand Faces:

A legendary hero is usually the founder of something—the founder of a new age, the founder of a new religion, the founder of a new city, the founder of a new way of life. In order to found something new, one has to leave the old and go on a quest of the seed idea, a germinal idea that will have the potential of bringing forth that new thing.

If on a Hero's journey, the Blue Mars team may have set out on the course of the old - but perhaps they've realized it's time to pivot to a new path.

Eric Reis introduced the concept of the pivot - "the idea that successful startups change directions but stay grounded in what they've learned. They keep one foot in the past and place one foot in a new possible future. Over time, this pivoting may lead them far afield from their original vision, but if you look carefully, you'll be able to detect common threads that link each iteration."

The thing about a pivot is that you have to take a very deliberate step in a direction that's informed by what you've learned so far while maintaining your balance and leveraging your existing customer base. Who are the Blue Mars customers in this case? They are the content creators and by all accounts, the Blue Mars-creator relationship is a strong one - contrary to that of Second Life - and they are taking that relationship with them toward the next pivot, to the exploding mobile market.

At this point, it may be folly to predict what Blue Mars Mobile will become in the next few years, but it could be nothing like a "premium 3D social virtual world". That's the beauty of a successful pivot, you go in one door looking like s step sister and come out the other end looking like a princess.

Pivotal Princess flickr

Pivoting is hard - you've got to kiss a lot of frogs - but the outcome can be magical. Some of the most predominant businesses of our time made successful pivots. My favorite is flickr.

Flickr was launched by Ludicorp in 2002 as a massively multiplayer online game called Game Neverending which sadly I never had the chance to play. GNE was cancelled in 2004, but by historical accounts it was a quirky and fun game focused on social interactions and object manipulation that had no end game for success (sort of sounds like Second Life), but the founders saw an opportunity to pivot. 

In an interview with Jesse James Garrett (JJG), flickr developer Eric Costello (EC) explains the flickr pivot (emphasis mine):

JJG: Do you feel like you had to sacrifice something to make the transition from the Flash application to a more traditional Web application?

EC: I think we did, but really what motivated the changes was what we had the most success with. Although the Flash application was, I think, a really innovative interface, and really fun to use, and a lot of people enjoyed it, I think it was a little too off the beaten path to really get a wide audience.

As we started adding features to the site itself, like pages that hosted the photos so that people could visit them at a unique URL, we had a lot more success with that. People responded to it, and the site began to grow. So our energies tended to be dedicated toward enhancing that aspect of the site.

We kept the Flash application, which we later came to call Flickr Live, around for a while. But eventually we took it down because there were some security issues with it, and we felt our development time was better spent on other things rather than fixing those. So we sacrificed something, but we ended up with something better than what we had before with Flickr Live. So you lose some things, you gain other things.

JJG: You mentioned that the changes in Flickr were driven by the areas where you saw the most user interest…

EC: Yeah, user interest, and also just comprehensibility. People understand a website full of photos better than they understand an innovative chat interface with photo sharing. Power users got what we were doing with Flickr Live and learned to swim pretty quickly, but people like my mom weren’t quite as quick to figure it out.

I encourage you to read the entire interview, but notice those two key points that Eric makes: GNE was too off the beaten path to get a mass audience and they needed to focus on what people understand. These are still stumbling blocks for Second Life.

Speaking of Second Life, flickr is a popular service for Second Life residents, with a growing number of groups - it is a great resource to get a sense of styles, new trends and places.

Old Ideas Can Grow in New Places
Yahoo! acquired Ludicorp and flickr in 2005 and the original founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake left the company in 2008.  Ironically, Stewart Butterfield is launching a new browser-based MMOG called Glitch - now in Beta - to which I am personally craving early access.

Don't discount massively multiple games or worlds on browsers and mobile as not viable - they are quite viable, just different. I've spent far too many hours playing "Pocket Legends - an MMOG in your pocket". It's really not so much "just like WoW but on your iPad" but it sure does feel like it.

My guess is the Blue Mars team is taking what Mary Meeker said very seriously - Rapid Ramp of Mobile Internet Usage Will be a Boon to Consumers and Some Companies Will Likely Win Big (Potentially Very Big) While Many Will Wonder What Just Happened - and escorting their customers and  what they've learned to this new place.  It's hard to imagine the existing Blue Mars on a mobile device, so I suggest you don't - it's not likely to be the same at all.

And oh, one more thing about pivots - Nokia used to sell rubber boots - it might be time to get some.

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Purposeful Connections

I was thinking this weekend about connections and relationship symmetries and how a few lines of policy (code) can either enhance or distort our ability to make purposeful connections. While so many Residents of Second Life worry about the "Facebookification" of the world, consider this my simple plea to consider some healthy "twitterification".

I've always described the distinction between Facebook and twitter on the basis of the respective relationship model symmetries - Facebook is symmetrical, while twitter is asymmetrical. This seemingly small distinction, as it turns out, changes the nature of the two platforms in a meaningful way. Facebook becomes about who you know, and twitter is about what you know (or want to know). Facebook is primarily a social network, while twitter is an information network. 

This isn't to say that these are mutually exclusive - certainly some people use twitter as a social network, and others use Facebook for information - but rather that the basic structure of the relationship model does shape predominant behavior, and stimulates innovative work-arounds by people who are unhappy with the imposed constraints. 

That social graph thing is plural, Zuck

Despite Mark Zuckerberg claiming that "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity" many people have more than one Facebook account so that they can manage their social graphs (plural, not singular) in ways that are meaningful to them - whether it be personal versus professional, corporeal versus avatarian, or any other perfectly valid distinction. 

I may be perfectly happy to friend you in the context of our acquaintance and shared interests such as a co-Resident of Second Life, but that doesn't mean I want to share the pictures of my kids, my cat, or my vacation with you. People set up Facebook accounts to play social games without exposing their actual friends and family to game play, updates, etc. while still allowing them to connect with other social gamers.

But Facebook wants you to have a single named identity and place in the world, as prescribed by your birth certificate, your location, your employer, your education, etc. People have learned - or are learning - that those old containers are no longer necessary or sufficient for the types of connections they want to make. That's not having a lack of integrity, that's being human. 

The single identity and uni-dimension friend or not friend Facebook model is, as so eloquently described by Lev Grossman, the social equivalent of liver failure.

Facebook runs on a very stiff, crude model of what people are like. It herds everybody — friends, co-workers, romantic partners, that guy who lived on your block but moved away after fifth grade — into the same big room. It smooshes together your work self and your home self, your past self and your present self, into a single generic extruded product. It suspends the natural process by which old friends fall away over time, allowing them to build up endlessly, producing the social equivalent of liver failure. On Facebook, there is one kind of relationship: friendship, and you have it with everybody. You're friends with your spouse, and you're friends with your plumber. SOURCE: Time.com

Purposeful, albeit asymmetrical, connections

In contrast, while the twitter asymmetric relationship model is still quiet primitive, it does afford more profound ways to easily connect with not just people we know, but ideas and information from people we don't know but sit at some intersection of our social and information graphs. 

Twitter delivers a unique blend of what I called structured serendipity - a place safe enough to be yourself with those like you while still discovering that and those which you might otherwise have missed had you had made those loosely knit and purposeful connections. 

This is a core tenant of the platform. Speaking at CES, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo tells Kara Swisher:

We want to instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them. See, that’s a good statement. We’re not just a social network that’s connecting people. It’s connecting for a purpose. 

Purposely connecting to those people and things that are important to you - instantly.  I love that.

Those words to me sound like a good alchemy for renewing Second Life. However, the Second Life relationship model feels strangely symmetrical, sort of like Facebook, and at what cost? A few come to my mind - unwieldy friends lists, limited scale groups (25 or 40, still too small) and unreliable and inflexible group communications.

What if relationships in Second Life were asymmetrical? What if I could choose to tell people I was at a live music performance, and instead of spamming my friends or enduring a group message failure, it would go out to people who followed me?  

I follow all kinds of people who are Second Life Residents outside of Second Life because they share interesting things - events, places, ideas - not because we are "friends" but because something in our collective graphs overlap. Why can't this be part of the Second Life experience instead of some disjointed flickr, twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, tumblr, posterous, etc. mess?

Allowing people to publish and subscribe to social transactions in world is a good way to stimulate interest and interaction and would go a long way to answering the "What is there to do here?" question that has been asked since the dawn of the grid, by newbies and oldbies alike.

Going into the year of connectedness, Second Life could use a social detox - a healthy overhaul of all things that connect people to people as well as to places, events and things. Maybe the place to start is reconsidering the relationship model, delivering chances for structured serendipity and refocusing on a mission of making purposeful connections.

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