Context, Community, Creativity, Credibility, Cost
After reading some lessons learned from a friend and coworker and tweeting a bit with him and others about Torque v.s. OpenSim/Second Life I thought I would expand on that discussion in this blog post. This is not a direct response and I generally prefer using virtual worlds rather than talking about them. So I will get it all out in this long post so hopefully I can get back to making stuff.
I’m Just Another Avatar, Honest
Skip this if you know me. If not, just know that those who do know me know I don’t get paid directly to promote virtual worlds or development them at work, even though I do a lot of it on my own. I’m just another avatar, who, after playing my first game of DOOM with friends back in the late 90s actually dreamed of creating a virtual Paris people could walk around in (without the Cacodemons of course). I spent most of my days then developing interactive language training experiences using Hypercard including large laser disks for BYU’s language lab. (Hi Harold, miss you, if you are reading.)
One project, Monte Video, which I did not directly work on, put the student in a Spanish town with interactive questions, vocabulary identification, basic speech recognition, and testing. Immersion and interactivity where key. I also remember being disappointed by VRML after really trying hard to get it to work. Anyway, the point is virtual worlds have been a passion of mine since before they were called that growing from a dream of mixing education, interaction, and collaboration.
THE Measure of Success: Adoption
Strong adoption is the goal and measure of virtual worlds success. Adoption is more than usage. Usage stats just get us started understanding adoption patterns and reasons.
Adoption involves taking ownership. Once adopted self-investment makes it difficult to move to something else. People may use three email clients because they are forced to but given a choice would consolidate. Such is more true of virtual worlds that share the same context. Having one or more virtual world for business, another for personal use, and another, say, to visit the Forbidden City just overwhelms most users. Think of how many times you have cursed a web page that requires a specific browser.
What promotes the strongest user adoption?
At the risk of sounding like a bad motivation speaker I have crammed the answer into five words beginning with C (guffaws welcome). [Note content and collaboration are not among them, which I explain.]
Context
After watching many (including my wife*) leave Second Life for other social computing I agree more than ever that “context is key.” Why trumps what. Those who most strongly adopt a given world come and stay because of the context it provides be it entertainment, education, or business.
The why must include justification of a 3D immersive experience. My definition of virtual world requires 3D though others might define more broadly. Other tools meet many adopters needs without the 3D, messaging, voip, email, irc, blogs, wiki.
Good examples of successful context include any game-focused worlds or sims. These are almost nothing more than context, World of Warcraft and Second Life role play sims come to mind.
Contextual OpenSim regions also seem to spring up every month as well. Many of them are likely not public as more schools adopt Cobalt-Edusim and OpenSim in the classroom and at home.
A good recent example of a valid business context was when a real-life Academy of Technology, facing elimination for cost, moved to Second Life (behind a corporate firewall). As travel dollars shrink with the economy I expect this will continue.
Is socializing sufficient context?
Socializing in a 3d space is a context but just one and usually needs more to be sustainable. Things as trivial as themed dance parties or more significantly discussion and user groups all add context to socializing. Such was the draw for me. After passing SL by the year before I later returned seeking a virtual Ruby user group to replace the real-world one that proved geographically unsustainable. Our meetings included slide presentations, a conference room, and the ability to read about one another through profiles.
The most compelling context is quite obviously education. This generation of K-12 students are not only adopting but expecting virtual world paradigms. I discuss more below about how educators are schooling the business world when it comes to innovation from virtual worlds.
[* My wife left because sculpties killed her furniture building fun and socializing, although valuable, remained less so than that afforded by her blog, Facebook, phone and bunko parties.]
Content Comes from Context
This is the difference between the debunked, content-centric if you build it they will come and context-focused if you have something to do they will come and stay. The latter obviously includes content but is driven by context.
Community
Having achieved buzzword sainthood by usage on The Office, community both attracts adopters and keeps them. Community is very closely linked with context but independent of it. You can have context without community but not community without context.
You may have visited interactive system demo sims and art galleries that lacked community but were strong on context and so succeeded. I have also watched communities dissolve when scope creep rendered them too generalized effectively eliminating context.
Community obviously includes communication. The better users are able to communicate, the less frustrated they will be and more likely to adopt. Such was likely behind the decision to include voice despite concerns in Second Life. People combine tools like Skype and conference phone calls with virtual worlds all the time to achieve the same result.
Collaboration, a buzzword now largely dead in virtual world discussions because of over-emphasis, is really just this communication and work achieved with a specific context by a community of two or more. To me context, community, and creativity cover collaboration.
By the way, I have read that social computing holds the same health benefit of membership in real life communities, though I can only find this article now.
Creativity
Why is Second Life winning over There, Active Worlds, Entropia, and others? Why is OpenSim presenting such a real challenge to Second Life? Why do home-grown enterprise virtual worlds languish faced with target adopter apathy? Creativity accounts for a lot.
Fun, style, self-expression, avatar customization, they all are just creativity. Creativity stems from the basic human need for self-actualization. Without it, we die, or at least look elsewhere for something that affords more.
Virtual worlds that constrain creativity have shown a loss of adopters to those that don’t. The market has proved Philip Rosedale’s vision of a world focused on user/resident creativity and ownership will ultimately dominate.
Users become loyal to worlds where they have expressed themselves the most. They take ownership. Platforms that promote this best, while enabling the transfer of creative assets (avatar, clothing created or purchased, structures, etc.) enjoy the most faithful adoption. This includes tools enabling the skills to express that creativity.
Bottom-line business does not value creativity.
Creativity is perhaps the least understood or appreciated by the business world–even more than context. Business folks often see creative user endeavors, such as developing ones avatar, as wastes of time, even distractions from more important efforts adding to the bottom line. Perhaps this is the reason educators, which focus on bringing out student creativity, are really dominating innovation in the virtual world space, (which we revisit later below).
Perhaps the bad business impression is from virtual worlds that provide no context or community and therefore leave behind a wasteland of virtual garbage, the discarded creative expressions and tests of hundreds who left when creativity alone was not enough.
Perhaps all those who have wrongly justified failed business ventures in virtual worlds are spreading angst. Most had no business there at all, which they discovered quite literally.
Perhaps many simply don’t care personally to express themselves through an avatar, find it silly, or think the four hours needed to be a waste of business time. Frankly, I can relate a little here. It should not take more than an hour to get your first customizable avatar working in any virtual world. But considering other monumental wastes of time forced upon us at work, creation of an avatar, if it can be a one-time thing is a good use of time. If anything this shows the dire importance of being able to take that avatar investment to any and all virtual worlds used for business, an argument, again, against incompatible home-grown platforms that a customer would never be allowed to enter.
At the end of the day, an adopter chooses the platform that allows the most self-expression and easiest management and transfer of one’s creative assets.
Even if you don’t need the creativity why not benefit from it.
Would you rather live your digital life in the virtual equivalent of Joe V.S. the Volcano’s cubical or a world filled with art you can walk through created by others whose reason for being there may be art alone but whose creations you enjoy while fulfilling your own usage of the virtual world. Even if you or your business does not need the level of creative expression available you still directly benefit from it being available to others that do.
Credibility
Before users will adopt any tool they need some level of confidence that the thing will be available and continue working–especially if they are to invest their time into it. World of Warcraft is more credible than Second Life, albeit a different context. Second Life much more credible than OpenSim, currently. All are more credible than the average home-grown internal virtual world, which is why OpenSim carries such appeal due to Second Life compatibility.
I think it was Wagner James Au that blogged the tip to those contemplating entry into Second Life that they should consider it “beta software” and make decisions accordingly. Many obviously missed that some losing millions. I still think that advice applies, but to many more virtual worlds than just Second Life. It most certainly applies to OpenSim, which on the front page warns that it is still alpha software.
Still creating one’s own internal virtual world for a company from scratch runs a strong risk of low credibility because adopters don’t know if it will be around next year. Other public and open technologies promise at least longevity if not immediate stability. Comparing the stability of a home-grown solution to that being developed by an open community is a wash at best.
Cost
Why don’t I have a World of Warcraft account? It costs to damn much. I do, however, pay my $60 (or whatever) a year for a Second Life Premium account. Users are cheap, but if the other four Cs are met they will pay.
Cost is not just for users but also those setting up a virtual world. The recent open spaces change in price sent sim owners and many users running for the closest alternative, OpenSim, where you can have your own (alpha/buggy) simulator for free. I didn’t hear from any of them that wanted to create their own virtual world from scratch using an existing game engine. Maybe because something like the Torque engine costs to much or has to many annoying advertisements in the “indie” version.
Cost seals the deal when it comes to user and owner adoption.
Where’s the business value?
Honestly there might not be any at all. Even though people like Gartner get up and showcase virtual worlds as the next big source of innovation maybe they just aren’t. For some business models virtual worlds don’t belong. Save your time and money investing in other tools, perhaps focused on social computing more than the 3D element.
If your target contexts/usages include simulation, learning, and relationship building virtual worlds have demonstrated business value. The blogosphere is filled with success stories in this space, from on-boarding global employees to simulating natural disasters, to understanding a dinosaur’s mandible joint, to befriending actual Broadway stars, to visualizing global weather patterns, to previewing real-life buildings with customer feedback before construction, to researching astronomy, anatomy, even physics.
Virtual worlds are also very much an extension of social computing, the greatest innovation of our time. When applied correctly, we hear more, see more, learn more, and do more than ever possible. Organizations that harness the raw social power provided by such current and future technologies will win big with a focus on services and software to support them. Some innovation will be the technology itself, but most will simply be enabled by it.
Enabler technology often takes the back seat to other traditional innovations, (which is practically an oximoron). I always come back to the examples of email, chat, web, even the telephone when they first emerged. Chat in particular was viewed harshly by the enterprise. People could get fired for ‘chatting’ on company time. Some companies still block all access to the web from the office for fear of employees surfing their time away. Today ‘instant messaging’ and web research are core tools enabling business innovation not to mention a better society. Twitter, Facebook, Second Life and OpenSim face the same scrutiny today but will ultimately prevail as ‘must haves’ not unlike the telephone itself.
… but don’t take my word for it
If you represent an organization considering any virtual world initiative, do yourself a favor, take some serious surveys of your people and what virtual world technologies they may have already adopted. Perhaps start by measuring usage, then build on that. Know your (potential) users. Talk to them. You might ask which virtual worlds they use, or might use, in their personal time. It is a good bet those same virtual worlds, or those closest to them, will enjoy the most adoption. Then focus your efforts on what those adopters want above all else.
Businesses are being schooled by educators when it comes to virtual worlds innovation.
The combination of open virtual world platforms such as Cobalt – EduSim and interactive white boards and laptops replacing textbooks (as all my kids will have in 2009) puts educators leading the pack in virtual worlds innovation that frankly the business world could really learn from.
Don’t believe me? Follow what Greenbush Labs is doing and think a few minutes about the business application of the techniques they are employing. These humble educators really get it. Simulation, conferences, and on-boarding naturally extend from school usage to teach language, geography, sciences, problem solving, art, and more.
You will notice the platforms receiving international award recognition and adoption by kids all over the world are not based on proprietary, high-cost solutions such as those built on Torque.
Don’t forget to regularly use it yourself.
Sometimes it feels like there are more people talking and blogging about virtual worlds than actually using them.
With all respect to the schedules and priorities of the many virtual world decision makers, evangelists, and bloggers. I humble suggest more need to actually use the stuff. Find out what it is good for. Discover applications that fit and what do not. I am not talking about a quick field trip although that is certainly a start. Learn it. Use the tech for something regularly. See if you can find a context that fits your usage.
My eyes have been opened to possibilities when I have forced myself to use things I would not have considered otherwise. That’s just preachin’ to the choir for most reading this. I have a lot yet to truly put to the test, but then again, that’s not my job. I’m just a user and enjoy the freedom to invest time in what fits my needs best when I wish, which happens to be why I was late to Second Life, Facebook, and Twitter, as happy as I am now that I have fully adopted them. The burden of ensuring adoptability rests with those bringing solutions to their organizations. We users might influence such decisions, if they care to consider our preferences, but in the end, we are just users.
This entry was posted on January 3, 2009 at 9:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized with tags business, edusim, lessonslearned, metaverse, opensim, secondlife, technology, torque, virtualworlds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 3, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Thanks for highlighting the Greenbush Labs site- it is very refreshing to see actual applications of the technology that many blog about. For the past 15 years, I have been focused on use of technology (primarily in medical education)- I am starting to write up some of the applications in my blog- http://jmerril.wordpress.com/
January 3, 2009 at 11:18 pm
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January 4, 2009 at 12:51 am
Mo,
This is a great article! I thank you for sharing this information with the public. I have a few case studies regarding using SIMS and other VE’s behind corporate firewalls. I see most of our clients requesting this usually for distant meetings, or for collaboration. I noticed that the ones that pushed their staff to adapt this new collaboration tool seem to be reaching their iniatives. However, there are still people out there that have this “field of dreams” mentality regarding VE. If anyone builds it for you they will come, which we all know that is not the truth. Thanks again for posting this and I hope everyone that is interested in using VE’s reads this over and over again!
January 4, 2009 at 4:22 am
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January 4, 2009 at 5:20 am
well written and thourough! i’ll share my dealio with sl. granted, i am a bit overboard what with having 18 sims (soon to be fewer in number but greater in Linden Lab tier).
creativity, collaboration, and community are the big pluses for me. i love to terraform and build (lol, peek at our flickr will attest to that).
i am not big on socializing for it’s own sake isl, i never do voice as i like the “veil” that my avatar affords me. i do love to build in groups and work with peeps on projects from creating island complexes for universities to creating free builds for special groups (builds for Deaf peeps were my first projects). and i also love the community we have on our estate. lots of really great people
cost. that’s a biggie for sure and stunts like the openspace fiasco really make it challenging
thanks for the great and thoughtful post, it is very well written
January 4, 2009 at 5:37 am
The value of Second Life, imo, should be viewed not unlike the web. Many companies have websites that have little measurable ROI. And to me, it seems that companies will need to have presence in some virtual 3D manner in the future. I work for a multinational company which has website that, frankly, does not do very much. Sure it’s informative, but our product is typically sold via real face time and is not the type of thing you would just buy over the web. And our site costs a lot of money to maintain.
But you pretty much have to have a website if you are a company. The same will be true of a 3D presence, but that may be a few years away.
The other big thing that Linden Lab has is content. User created content is a big advantage that Second Life offers. A quick trip over to openlifegrid demonstrates that. It’s really great to see new people arrive at openlifegrid with the first text they chat being “where can I get hair?”, “where can I get clothes?”. =D
It’s an advantage that SL offers but it is only a matter of time for content in OpenSim, or other yet to be created worlds, catches up.
But . . . I heartily agree with your points and thank you for such a provocative post.
On another note, would you mind if I point people to your great tutorials? I spoke at the eLearning Guild’s DevLearn08 conference two months back and will be a presenter at their online forum on January 30th and your tutorials would be well received.
January 4, 2009 at 3:58 pm
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January 4, 2009 at 3:58 pm
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January 5, 2009 at 12:20 am
@iliveinsl Thanks for your feedback, you power user you.
Tutorials are for anyone and everyone. Attribution is always nice. I need to do more. I have topics for an ‘Alright Av’ series targeted at itermediate and advanced users, but delayed by MoPose coding and more blogging than usual.
NCI is, of course, always something I recommend to new folks.
I too would also like to see things like prim hair and good clothes show up on more OpenSim grids–especially our internal one–and personally am going to offer what I can up for stock and other content in the new year, but so many others are so very much more talented than I.
Part of the frustration in rallying the content community is coming up with a good way to bring content into the many OpenSim grids and convincing content creators it is worth the effort. Hiri makes excellent points about what content creators might be thinking about OpenSim that lends to this hesitance even trepidation.
Some central content distribution point, like an SL exchange or OnRez, (besides Second Inventory), I think would benefit many. I am sure Ashne has already had her entrepreneurial sights set on that. The day we can buy or simply pick from a selection of searchable content and have that import into the inventory of our avatar on a specific target OpenSim grid will be the day OpenSim has really arrived. Imagine maintaining a master inventory on such a distribution site, browseable without a 3D viewer even running with an “Import to Grid” drop down of all our OpenSim grids. What if we even had an additional HyperInventory tab in the Hippo or other viewer where we could manage a local cache of master inventory across all grids to which we might connect. It will eventually come and we are getting closer with all the wonderful RESTful stuff already added to OpenSim and, yes, the ideas behind Second Inventory.
January 5, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Macker has convinced me further virtual worlds have no business value for some.
I honestly get more done at work using other enabler technologies. The thought of throwing a virtual world at my development team for, say, a design session makes me shutter. We squawk at each other quite well over phone and Skype. IRC, wikis, and video notes are our biggest modern enablers. We tried video chat for a while, but it just gave us a better way to tell each other off when the design debates got just a little too heated.
[/me is suddenly wondering when individual finger joints will be able to be animated in gestures]
My use of Second Life and OpenSim has been purely for fun, even escape. I continue to mask my work associated groups. I am not there for work even though I do hope to shift my ‘day job’ work to directly involve virtual worlds eventually.
Work has surprisingly found me there. I have bonded with coworkers–even skydived with Directors–that I could never have met in any 2D space. That and the sheer fun of creating things will remain my strongest reason to remain a virtual worlds citizen. And no, that is not reason enough for any business to promote any virtual world, but you would be surprised how much work gets done while having fun. Virtual golf anyone? (I stink at both.)
However, this little nugget really smacks of the same tired SL-fobia akin to inference that Second Lifers (and by association OpenSimers) are at best hobbiest geeks incapable of attracting real mates and at worst sex-crazed, furry-dressing, mental patients (or worse, MTV fans). I am sure my friend meant no such inference.
I HATE the name “Second Life.” It has nothing to do with a ’second’ life for me and many at all. And no, it is not pure escapism for most, although that could be said of anything, television, sports, any game, blogging, excessive Black and Tan drinking. ;P Calling users escapists may, however, be a veiled excuse (or reason) to not become more directly involved.
I have escaped into Second Life before like anything. Frequently my wife and I will escape into a good movie. That is not harmful. But Macker is dead on by linking escapist use of business virtual worlds to business detriment. Having the two in such close proximity is a real business risk. Point very well taken. The question is, will such a risk outweigh lack of adoption due to employees having more than one virtual world to manage between personal and professional life.
As a side note, Rich White reminded me in a tweet that for many educators Second Life is not an option, not even the Teen grid. School networks won’t allow any connection and for obviously good reason.
I think the goal is a virtual world platform that allows virtually transparent movement between a business context and a personal/public context like the intranets and internet of today. Again, Second Life and OpenSim are the platforms closest to accomplishing this goal.
In short, Macker’s post very convincingly argues that conventional virtual worlds–or any virtual worlds–do not belong in some business settings at all, just as the web or message have no place in some business settings. The existence of such setting is dwindling, however, and most businesses will eventually find employees needing access to ‘conventional’ virtual worlds that mesh with internal ones just as much as they need the web now to conduct business.
January 5, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Mo, you pretty much nailed what I was getting at.
The creative expression and social aspects of the medium are what drew me to Second Life to begin with; I see their visceral draw. But the people who will use this technology the most in the face of financial crisis are those who need to meet with others. Building and self-expression are not really team sports.
January 5, 2009 at 3:13 pm
That was a quite thought-provoking article
For some reason, however, I feel you’re hitting the nail on something, but I haven’t quite understood what it is. Not yet.
While things like “creativity” were quite well explained, I miss the point about “context” (or rather the importance it plays in the overall success). What, exactly, is that magic “context” in a social environment?
For games it’s easy: it’s the game background (the story), the game rules, the characters, how they interact, how you level up… in the real world, being a fan of a football or baseball club also has a lot of “context”: you join the forums, you watch the games together, you go out with friends talking about the games… Fashionistas, again, have their own context too, from exchanging fashion magazines, watching Project Runway and What Not To Wear on TV together, going for a shopping free… is this all context? I might infer from your words that yes, that’s exactly it, and allegedly Second Life is missing it totally … or at least, missing it to a degree, since it seems to exist only in role-playing sims.
Well, I’m not quite sure about that. There is, obviously, some meta-context — SL residents talking about SL itself. Educators, researchers on conferences, thinkers, evangelists, technologists — all those get together to talk about what SL is and what it can do. However, just a tiny fraction of SL residents enter SL with the purpose of, well, talking about SL.
In reality, residents find their own context (or, in some cases, create their own context) inside SL. Some are just language-based; ie. regional communities form because they have a language in common. Sometimes it’s because of music — your presence in Second Life is restricted to the environment where musicians play and chat together with the audience. In some cases it’s games, too, like SL football. Students collaborate or attend classes in SL. Artists present their work — either reproductions of their RL work in SL galleries, or experiment with SL art as a new medium. Or, at the lowest level, your context is just “being together with your friends”.
So if your argument is that Second Life “lacks context” I would claim it lacks as little content as the real life or the Web; it’s way too “big” to narrow down to a specific context (unlike, say, World of Warcraft), since it is a platform to generate context. Perhaps a good analogy would be Ning. By itself, Ning doesn’t provide any context (and no content at all), but it certainly is a platform that allows any group to develop and bring their content inside a specific community’s context. SL is analogous, with the difference that it’s vastly more flexible in terms of choices on how to create that context: a “group” in Ning is a set of pages with similar options and choices (only the content — and the context — changes), while in SL it can be a sim, a whole continent, or just a group of residents standing on top of a plywood prim hovering over a sandbox. There is no “one size fits all” solution to develop a group/community, and even the concept that “a community fills a virtual space” is not correct. Many communities in SL doesn’t have their own spot but still thrive nevertheless.
So, the difficulty for a new resident is exactly finding out where you will be contextualised inside the virtual world. Many leave in disgust because they cannot feel any empathy for anything they see. In truth, the larger SL grows, the harder it is to find a spot where we might “contextualise” ourselves. It’s true that specific communities — role-playing communities are a good example you gave; language-based communities are another one — will definitely provide the adequate context, but… they are hard to find (specially if a clueless new resident has no idea that they are, in fact, available). On Ning, for instance, it’s easy to look up those communities. On other social tools you have “groups” or “clans” that are quite easy to find. In Second Life, groups are not communities (and communities might have several groups or even none) so there is no easy way to find “a place”. Second Life is indeed too vast, and a bit like the Web on the pre-Google days: you know that a lot was over there, but you had no way to find it, unless you knew in advance where it was.
On the question “Where’s the business value?” which you answer “Honestly there might not be any at all” I can only answer, again, with the parallel of the Yellow Pages or the World-Wide Web: for a business to use either of these, the immediate reward comes from a return of your investment in more sales, but that is just possible to do if you have a way to measure your return. On the “paper” version of the YP that might be next to impossible; on the Web, if you have an e-Commerce site, the relationship might be direct. But if you just list your products, or have PDFs for your products’ manuals, or just provide a forum for discussing your products with other users… where is the value in that?
In the latter case it’s not tangible, and that’s why many companies do embrace social websites to “gather a community” who are just potencial customers but with little return except unmeasurable goodwill. Second Life is a bit like that, too. The problem here is not to ask “where is the value”, but how to measure it and manage expectations. This is the major reason for some of the past failures of the corporate world to use SL successfully — like you so well put it, the era of “if you build, they will come” is long gone (probably never existed!), and it’s hard to successfully exploit SL to a company’s advantage.
Why do companies use, say, YouTube or Twitter? They get as a return “a number of clicks” (or followers, or subscriptions, or views). All those are absolutely abstract terms that bear relevance to “but how many customers did we get?”. Nevertheless, we have now 15 years of metrics on the Web, and several generations of e-marketing experts pushing the concept that “having a lot of hits on your webpage/social web thingy is the same as viewing ads on TV or on a board”. And they’re right. Still, there is not really a tangible measurement — how many of the thousands who viewed Xerox’s viral marketing on YouTube have bought one of their high-end copiers? Do they even have a remote clue?
No, but they still invest in pushing videos to YouTube because they watch the counters go up.
SL suffers for being too young. The value of a “community” for corporate business is just yet being explored by new-generation marketeers like Douglas Atkins’ “The Culting of Brands”. It also requires quite different metrics to explore and understand the value. When talking about social environments, as opposed to consumers on a supermarket queue, it’s always way hard to figure out how much the return on investment will be. Still, there are equivalent metrics in SL (for instance, page hits/views on a website are totally anonymously, while in SL you can have at least the avatar names who visited and use that for the next promotion), they just require creativity (surprise, surprise!) to be deployed successfully.
January 5, 2009 at 3:24 pm
I forgot to add something on the topic of credibility. That is, indeed, something quite interesting, which is how “credibility” is managed in the digital world. Strangely enough, both Linden Lab and Twitter started as poor start-ups with few resources but some VC funding. After a few years, both have semi-crippled software, but we are so used to glitches that we consider both companies to be “credible”. While OpenSim, because it’s even newer, has zero credibility
Where does one draw the line?
Although your point is well made.
So… where does the credibility come from? (Hopefully the answer is not “from the media”, or SL would have died in 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, respectively, as the media keeps “foreseeing” its “death due to the lack of business credibility”)