Tuesday, October 30, 2007

A White Paper Explaining SL and its immediate Value Proposition for B2B Media Companies

Second Life is a new communications medium in which people meet inside a computer simulation of a 3D physical space. The simulated space can range from something whimsical, like the Greenies' "home world," to a relatively accurate representation of the real world, like the Second Life homes of Pontiac, IBM, Cisco, and Dr. Dobbs Journal (pictured at right). People appear in SL as "avatars" that they create. Avatars also range from whimsical to realistic. Second Life is in some ways just one of 50 or more virtual worlds, all of which share a common heritage evolving out of the world of video games and multiplayer online games.

But Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, had the brilliantly insightful idea to put out into the world what amounts to a multiplayer video game platform with no game!

(That's cybercelebrity Callie Cline below, handing out signed copies of her Pontiac Solstice. She was hired by Pontiac as the world's first spokesavatar, and named No. 95 on Maxim magazine's list of the world's 100 hottest women. I kid you not.)

And so thousands of developers have set up residency in SL, inventing everything from real estate development businesses to avatar creation businesses to sex shops (every new technology has its share of sex shops). All of this is made possible by two elements of the Second Life platform (in addition to the open, unfettered nature of the platform itself):
  • Linden Labs created an "inworld" currency, the Linden dollar (L$), which is tied to the U.S. dollar at an exchange rate of roughly L$268 to $1. The L$ has evolved into a neat micropayment system.
  • Second Life residents are granted property rights to anything they create. Therefore, SL residents can sell their creations and earn real money.
Why does this matter to business media professionals? Remember my opening statement: Second Life is a new communications medium. Just as with the last big new medium to come along, the Internet, it is still too early to predict all the possibilities this new medium represents. But one possibility is already apparent to those of us who have spent real time in SL: It is a potent forum for business meetings and even medium-sized conferences. I like to tell people that, if you can imagine the value of attending a teleconference on one end of a spectrum, with the value of attending an in-person conference at the other end, then attending a meeting in Second Life gets you about 80% of the way there. And in some ways, meetings in Second Life are better than in-person meetings. Video conferencing experiences pale by comparison. Best of all, anyone can attend an SL meeting from anywhere on the globe, without leaving their desk. And as SL grows, its meeting-hosting prowess will improve.

People who have never experienced SL (especially if they are of the baby boomer generation) scoff at the idea that a cartoon world can be used for a serious business purpose. The explanation for why it works has to do with arcane details of brain function that I don't pretend to understand, but which I distill to this: because you know that sitting behind each avatar in the meeting is an actual person who is (at least mostly) paying attention, your brain imbues the setting with an appropriate seriousness of purpose. To distill this to essence: You actually sense the presence of others in an SL meeting. It's like magic.

THE SECOND LIFE LAND RUSH
The combination of fun, games, opportunity, and serious business intent creates so many different motivations to enter Second Life that there has been a land rush, captured by the press in the form of hype. But here are some actual adoption statistics that may come as a surprise. These stats are as of Oct. 28 end-of-day (midnight Second Life Time [SLT], where SLT = Pacific time):
  • There were 31,387 new signups during the previous 24-hour period, bringing SL to 10,490,916 total signups.
  • There was peak concurrency (i.e., the number of residents logged in simultaneously) of 56,181 at 2:25PM SLT (a new record!), and a minimum concurrency of 29,033 at 11:50PM. Median concurrency for the day was 43,077.
  • In the last 60 days, 1,412,534 residents logged into SL at least once.

The number of SL residents has spiked a bit in recent weeks due to two television events: CBS's CSI: New York did an episode on Oct. 24 titled "Down The Rabbit Hole" in which the CSI team chases an assassin into Second Life; and the following evening NBC's The Office did an episode involving Second Life. The CSI folks have concocted an elaborate plan to lure viewers into SL, detailed at their Web site.

Closer to the home of business media, Jeff Barr is a Web Services Evangelist for Amazon whose job is to go around the world speaking at conferences and to corporations about Amazon's Web infrastructure services. He's discovered that the profile of SL residents closely matches his target customer. Jeff told me he is trying like hell to curtail his travel and do more speaking in SL, so he can spend more time with his family. His coworkers laugh at him because they think he's playing games, but he is an effective evangelist, reaching customers all over the world, without having to leave his desk. There are many Jeff Barrs in SL, and more arriving every day.

HOW CAN SL MEETINGS POSSIBLY BE BETTER THAN REAL LIFE?
The image below was captured during an SL panel session when IBM and Linden Labs discussed their joint effort to create portability and interoperability standards among the different virtual worlds. The session was conducted entirely in text chat (other sessions have been done in voice, voice with slides, or video). Regardless of whether the panelists/presenters use voice, video, or text, audience members are free to contribute thoughts and questions in the text window at any time during the session. Panelists see these comments in real time and can choose to respond or ignore them; they can effectively incorporate these thoughts and questions into an integrated whole with the rest of their content. The characteristics of SL support this kind of interaction because, in SL, it is non-intrusive; but the real-world equivalent (shouting a question from the audience) would not be tolerated during an in-person event.
In addition, note the tabs along the bottom of the text chat window. Each tab opens onto a different conversation. Although you can't make out the blurred text, there is the main tab housing the public discussion in this space; then comes a tab wherein I was IM'ing questions to Ziggy Figaro, the panel moderator (another accepted form of interaction); in another I was asking technical advice of the island's operations manager and hostess, Rissa Maidstone; in another, having a personal discussion with a colleague; and finally, the last tab is for a group to which I belong, members of which were in attendance and having a private group-wide side conversation.

The same factors that make SL a great meetings forum also make SL a great place to foster community. But don't make the mistake of viewing SL as a "3D Web"; while the Web is all about human interaction with automated systems (think eBay, Amazon, Google), Second Life is all about human interaction with other humans. Second Life represents the emergence of a brand new communications paradigm. But what's new and important about Second Life is its synchronous communications directly among live human beings, not the asynchronous communications of email or the automated human-machine interaction of Amazon and Google.


WHAT SHOULD A BUSINESS MEDIA COMPANY DO?
The answer to this question will vary by market segment, as follows: the more technically savvy your audience, the more quickly you must move to develop a place in Second Life for that audience to form a community around your brand. Otherwise, as history has shown through the rise of the Internet, someone else will do it for you. Many companies were blindsided by the sudden rise of the Internet. Don't let it happen again. I don’t refer only to audiences for technical subjects, but rather an audience for any subject that happens to be comfortable with the use of computer technology and networking. This includes most any audience under 35.


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