For those of you who are interested in such things, I’m appearing on Metanomics tomorrow at 12:00 Noon PDT on a panel discussing Robert Bloomfield’s recent interview with Second Life founder Philip Rosedale.
Other panelists include TIG Contributor Benjamin Duranske, Wagner James Au, ‘Dusan
Writer,’ Nic Mitham, Tish Shute, ‘Betinna Tizzy,’ and Roland Legrand.
You can catch Metanomics “live” in Second Life or via the web.
Robert Bloomfield forwarded me some exerpts of his recent interview with Linden Lab's founder Philip Rosedale asking for me to publish my feedback. I think that Philip's viewpoint has really evolved over the last two years from his early unbridled enthusiasm to his middle unbridled enthusiasm to his more recent tempered enthusiasm. He deserves credit for driving popular opinion in the virtual worlds market with his bold pronouncements, and his recent proclamations have been no less controversial.
The exerpt that Robert sent is below with my thoughts on Philip's most recent interview.....
Continue reading "Metanomics and Rosedale's future vision" »
A little over a year ago, I wrote a number of industry and technology forecasts within a blog post entitled Look into the ball and tell me what you see. In the post, I predicted changes and announcements in the Virtual Worlds industry, and I'd be a poor futurist and technologist if I didn't revisit that blogpost and see how my predictions fared. Most futurists are loathe to do this sort of thing, as rear-view mirrors are usually not very flattering. There was a humorous anecdote I once read in one futurist tome about a professional forecasting study done in England where the most accurate forecasters of future events were actually plumbers.
So, with the prescient-plumbers in mind, lets revisit my prediction of June of 2007 for June of 2008 and see how I fared:
Prediction: "T= This time next year. Three or Four major 'verses competing for customers with status/infrastructure innovation ("Transfer your avatar and property to our world for free from Second Life when you join, no charge!" (American and United regularly do this with frequent travelers)). Voice is common, and the 'verse developers have finally figured out that the utility of their 'verse is directly effected by the amount of other data sources they can integrate into their environment (Note: RSS is a fine start, but it's a .0001 on a 10 scale). Worldwide adoption of virtual environments as a dominant Internet tool is still <1%."
Verdict: Fast forward to June 2008. Google Lively launched in July, IBM was demo-ing multiple internal virtual world efforts and announcing interoperability but did not officially ship any product as part of their collaboration suites, Microsoft was mum, and Sony Home slipped not once but twice from their Beta in 2007. So, from the enumerated vendors in the blogpost, I missed launch by a few months, batting a big zero for timing. On the other hand, each platform prides itself on data integration, specifically video or slides, from the outside world. No one is really interested in 'transfer your property' yet.
Revisionist history verdict: Sun (a major player) shipped Wonderland code for public download. Lively shipped one month later than I predicted. IBM is working on private label products using multiple virtual worlds for hand-picked customers. A slew of startups have shipped, like Rivers Run Red and Electric Sheep, in addition to the major technology players.
Final verdict: I under-estimated the timing of the launches. They are all walled gardens as predicted (no interoperability other than the proof-of-concept demonstration by IBM with SecondLife and OpenSim). Feature functionality for the most part is better than SL (or is SL++ like RRR's offerings) with the notable exception of Lively.
The predictions and prognostications regarding virtual world interoperability are proving less and less relevant as we see disruptive players enter the market with web-based solutions (Electric Sheep, 3DExplorer, etc.) that do not require a fat download or special browser software. As these environments begin to leverage the vast array of social networking APIs, other micro-blogging technologies such as Twitter and Pownce, and communications technologies such as AIM or Skype for VoIP, the relevance of walled-garden-interoperability seems rather outdated. It never has made sense to walk your avatar between World of Warcraft and Second Life, and it seems even less relevant to do so now between Lively and Second Life other than to make it simpler to have your avatar look consistent between tools. However, this is putting lipstick on the pig if we don't address the broader concern of compartmentalization of these environments, essentially replicating the Instant Messaging market instead of the Email market, where we can use interoperable systems and different clients for the same end result.
There have also been a number of platforms launched in the intervening year for virtual environments (Electric Sheep, Multiverse retreaded, VastPark, others) that will be interesting experiments in toolkit vs. finished product.
A sad casualty of the last year was Transmutable/Ogoglio, Trevor Smith's efforts towards building 3D spaces as a web service that could be leveraged. I hope someone is able to take the gauntlet from Trevor's efforts and carry them forward, because I predict that this approach has the most promise of any of the models currently deployed. Make it a feature, not a product, or (heaven forbid) industry. That's when you'll see real market penetration numbers and ROI.
In my (new) formal day job, I'm putting the finishing touches on the Technology Intelligence Group's Virtual World Industry Outlook for 2008-2009, with some specific focus on not only activity in the last year but also leading indicators like VC money-flow, new major market entrants and potential standards emerging from surprising places. This will dive into much greater detail about predictions for the coming year beyond this post or last year's crystal ball. Stay tuned, it'll be one of our first publications as soon as the main site goes live.
2007 was unquestionably a significant year in the development of the Virtual Worlds industry. It went from a mocking human interest story at the end of the nightly news to the covers of prominent business magazines. As the proverb says however, 'Be careful what you wish for....'
There have been prior attempts at a 3D Internet, particularly around the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (or VRML). There were a number of market reasons that VRML never reached widespread adoption that were independent of VRMLs technical merits. In contrast 2007 featured the ramp of Second Life for public social collaboration and visibility for companies such as Forterra Systems for intraverse simulation and training.
The questions that we were asked during the 'New Ways of Working' panel at the Virtual Worlds 2008 conference last week in New York all seemed to be searching for the elusive initial proof-points to justify and quantify the benefit of virtual worlds in the enterprise. This is not unique to virtual worlds, and is a recurring theme in all of the emerging technology trends I have participated in. Early adopters attempting new projects within their organizations fortify themselves with metrics and other case-studies of successful deployments to demonstrate to their management the benefits of the technology in question, and virtual worlds are certainly no exception.
The current proof-pillars of this industry, however, are still scarce, with elaborate simulations being performed by the U.S. Government within Forterra Olive, as well as the Stanford SUMMIT medical simulations on the same platform. In the consumer area, there have been numerous examples of training and education within Second Life (including my employer) and isolated non-self-referential instances of collaborative design projects (most notably Wikitecture). What has not happened yet are the secondary ripples of these initial 'It can be done' proofs-of-concept, which will begin the snowball effect of more examples feeding more deployments which become examples for subsequent projects. It will take some sobriety on the part of marketing departments throughout industry, making sure to identify real value and not hand-waving, and it will take more time for the existing trials being conducted to bear fruit.
Two negative side effects of the excess of positive press in 2007 were that (1) each vendor in the 3D simulation area became an overnight sensation while many of their platforms were not ready for mainstream deployments, and (2) the peripheral/adjacent markets in this space (3D rendering engines, virtual economies, etc.) stampeded over to participate in the virtual gold rush, which made it harder for non-industry customers to get a bead on what this space actually is and how it benefits their organizations.
What this market pressure has exerted is a degree of speciation, in that companies are beginning to polarize into platform providers (intraverse or metaverse?), and component technology providers. An impacting externality to this is the emergence of the 'software as a service' business model within companies, who are evaluating these new virtual worlds not only from a 'should we/shouldn't we' decision, but also from a 'hosted/service' decision as well. One more barrier to adoption.
Speaking of barriers, if you ask most virtual world platform vendors what their top five barriers to adoption are, inevitably one of them will be the issue of 'corporate firewalls'. Given the immaturity of the technology, the non-standardization of ports and protocols used across vendors (which, admittedly, will be the case for some time as is the case in each new technology cycle), and the absence of overwhelming-demand on the part of major corporate clients, the corporate information-security technology departments will be in no hurry to poke holes in the corporate firewalls for a currently unproven application. It will happen over time, or the protocols used may render the discussion moot by leveraging lessons learned by companies like Skype in the VoIP space.
You see the initial furtive steps of companies to offer both a SaaS or Hosted model of their collaboration environments (such as the IBM/Linden Lab announcement) as well as overtures in that direction by companies like Qwaq. That will remove one barrier to adoption.
There have been the overtures towards data standardization with Multiverse and Google embracing COLLADA (and Intel hiring COLLADA people as part of their strategy) and the Virtual Worlds Interoperability Forum (of which I am a member). These efforts will initially focus on interoperability between virtual worlds and Internet data sources (like COLLADA files) rather than avatar portability. In contrast to my prior post about the future of virtual worlds, this degree of interoperability will be sufficient for some time as the broader Internet identity problem is resolved, as a choice of 'presentation layers' (in the form of virtual worlds) of a common dataset will be functional enough to limp along. The difficulty in that scenario will be in cross platform meetings.
The next post will posit some paths that the industry can take at this juncture, and if it will continue to be rather boutique, or will move into mainstream deployments.
Last week I had the honor of keynoting the Friday session at the CMP Metaverse Life 2.0 conference. During the presentation, I mentioned the multiple points of evidence that I had encountered of the evolution underway from traditional workplaces to geographically-independent workspaces. The summary of the argument is:
We have been gradually migrating from a traditional industrial-age workplace metaphor of individual work tasks performed in a shared setting (think of a cubicle-farm of either call-center representatives or engineers occupying three floors of a building) to a Knowledge-age metaphor of more collaborative, integrated tasks that are performed by virtual, geographically dispersed teams. So, instead of doing autonomous work in a collaborative setting, we are doing collaborative work in more and more autonomous (or at least geographically distinct) settings. This is the Shift.
As far as proof points for the arguments, consider the trends towards globalization of industry (and therefore a more distance-collaboration-sensitive market) that are an inevitability of the flattening effect of world commerce, outsourcing and off-shoring of labor and other tasks, and an increasing trend towards telecommuting, flexible work arrangements and work-at-home roles. JetBlue stay-at-home call center agents come immediately to mind.
A factor (that I hadn’t really considered until recently reading more about the major impact on the global workforce composition by the retirement of the baby-boomer generation) is that there will be a shortage of skilled labor in many areas that will mandate new tools to allow retired boomers to selectively participate in the workforce. If these gainfully-unemployed retirees are to be courted in this soon to be ‘sellers market’, the successful ‘buyers’ will be those that provide the tools for frictionless distance collaboration from their balmy retirement locations.
Having recently ‘pitched’ a room full of senior citizens on new technology trends, I can assure you that they are disinclined to buy a computer (if they do not already have one), much less create an avatar. They are comfortable with the traditional workplace metaphor described above, with autonomous-work/shared-environment, so any tools that are developed for them must be painfully easy-to-use and consistent with their ingrained habits.
(addendum- Some people have mis-interpreted this prior paragraph to imply that I am making some ageist comments about the technical abilities of people older than my 40-year-old-self. Before everyone gets more fired up than they already are, let me assure you that I have worked for/with/managed young and old alike who are technophilic or technophobic, and that age has little to do with it. I will say, and gladly stand by, that my six and three year old daughters are more inclined to go-to-work as avatars than nearly all people I work with regularly in Silicon Valley. The point being, we need easier to use tools that leverage workplace metaphors we are all familiar with, not something orthogonal and disruptive. Unless you are three or six years old, at which point, 'disrupt away')
To return to the Shift, what tools will we need to develop to enable technophobic retirees to participate in a Hollywood-style of work? Is it easy video-conferencing, shared whiteboarding, avatars?
Suggestions welcome and encouraged.
I received a nice note from John Jainschigg over at CMP Metaverse this morning about last week's Future of Work blogpost. He had resonated (as had I) with the idea of 're-intermediation' that was put forward by one of my colleagues (who at this juncture should feel free to chime in on the comment roll and remind me, pretty please with sugar on it) at the MetaverseU a few weeks ago.
Someone once said that every challenge is also an opportunity, and the converse is true as well. The workforce is being rapidly globalized, and roles you would have never envisioned being outsourced are migrating to Bangalore or Beijing at a breakneck pace. I was personally shopping prices on personal assistants from three different shops in India earlier this week, something which would have seemed insane half-a-decade ago.
At the same time, you have the demographic mass of baby-boomers who are frustrated with the first generation of outsourced service, and are demanding a higher-touch model of customer care. This is going to have two effects if it 'gets legs', which isn't such a BIG IF:
1) Operational Expenses (OpEx) of the firms switching to providing 'domestic' customer care is going to go up in most cases. Despite the vaunted examples of JetBlue and others in having stay-at-home-moms-in-Utah provide call center support, US labor is inherently more expensive than other parts of the world can currently provide. The rising cost of living in India and China combined with the falling value of the dollar are driving those forces towards some equilibria, however it's not going to resolve for another decade or more.
2) A gray-dawn contract workforce. The boomers aren't ready to sit back and accept a uni-directional money flow. They want to work, and wouldn't mind if you offered some health care while you're at it. There are some amazingly well-trained people in the boomer generation just now retiring, like 12 percent of the engineers and 21 percent of the scientists at NASA for starters, who are ready to tackle whatever technological marvels you throw at them.
If you don't think that the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) isn't already the strongest lobby in Washington D.C. already, wait until their numbers swell with the boomer bolus. They will be in a position to not only harangue your CEO for making them wait an hour for a call center representative, they will also exert pressure in the form of regulatory measures and tax laws to drive macro-level patterns of business. Think of how large of a group of people this represents, how well-educated, and how much free time they will have on their hands to do nothing but what fix the aspects of their life that annoy them most. Pretty much the customers from hell.
So the latte-slurping freelance workforce I posited in the last post, while agreeing with all of Prokofy's comments that delivering babies, pizzas and taxis will always exist in meatspace and are immune to the transition from manufacturing to knowledge workers, will be both servicing the baby boomer generation, and will also be comprised of a number of those boomers who will work-at-leisure to finance their vacations and second-home-property taxes.
And for those that are concerned that boomers and seniors will be discriminated against directly or indirectly because of their age, how about their avatar? Their Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie looking one.
A metaverse outpost would allow them to provide value to the workforce from their snow-bird homes in the desert or on the Gulf coast. In the Metaverse, no one knows that they are a retired engineer sitting on his/her back deck enjoying a margarita while resolving your customer service problem.
More later, the treadmill beckons.
From February 15th through February 17th, people from industry and academia gathered at Stanford University to participate in two events.
The first was a continuation of the excellent Metaverse Roadmap work that had started two years ago, which is an attempt to capture and forecast the coming changes in the user interaction model with the Internet. If you haven't read the original MVR, you can find it here.
The second event was (or rather 'is', as it is still underway) the MetaverseU, which is a combination of presentations and open discussion covering various facets of the virtual worlds, augmented reality, and lifelogging, with a particular focus on the human factors and societal impact of an idealized Metaverse.
The event is being streamed live (and freely) into Second Life here, and Henrik Bennetsen has taken a further step of creating a time capsule of where we are in this technology cycle by interviewing all of the participants and attendees with four questions regarding the best and worst things of current technology, and the opportunities and unforseen downsides of the future adoption of same. His interviews will be published on YouTube under the group 'MetaverseU', as well as tags on Flickr and elsewhere tagged 'MetaverseU' Henrik has also blogged about what he is doing on the MetaverseU blog here.
It think this is a good example of forward thinking in being able to tag content distributed around the Internet as a distributed transcript and record of the event. Consider it 'Distributed Lifelogging'. Now, if we could incorporate Twitter and Second Life chat transcripts.....in one portal.........
I had written previously about the opportunities to reduce air travel by substituting virtual meetings for physical meetings, however reading through the excellent work already being done for Blog Action day has really got me motivated to make a change today.
I'd like to make a bargain with you......
For the remainder of the year, don't fly. Neither will I. Instead, we will use the amazing array of tools at our disposal, from Telepresence to WebEx to avatar-mediated communications, to approximate the magic of physical proximity.
What's the bargain? I promise to pay $1000 out of my own pocket per airline trip that I take between now and the end of the year. Where does that $1000 go? The Nature Conservancy. So the result is a win-win, either I fund the Nature Conservancy to look into solutions for combating rising emissions, or I reduce my share of airline-related emissions. I don't drive to work or else I'd suggest the same for cars. If you are game, then publicly promise to do the same.
There are a number of us in the virtual world space that travel from virtual world event to virtual world event to speak and do business, and the question always arises 'why cant we do this virtually?'. Well, if 30 or more speakers were looking at $1000 fines each for flying, I bet you'd see a really big virtual world event conducted in the virtual world.
Feel free to track me on Dopplr to confirm I am keeping my side of the bargain. How do I reach you again?
In preparation for an upcoming presentation, I made the (evidently treacherous) step of attempting to aggregate the entire population of self-proclaimed virtual worlds. This is a tricky effort for multiple reasons:
1) "What's in a name?"- The 'Virtual World' moniker runs the gambit from children's educational sites like Mokitown/Mobilekids through game-narrative-driven sites like World of Warcraft, and from web-based marketing vehicles like Coke Studios/MyCoke through to proprietary walled-garden worlds like Second Life and There.com. You may as well have called them 'Web 2.0' for all the ground the VW term covers.
2) "Actual Mileage may vary"- Each company measures users/residents of their virtual worlds differently, as you would expect for marketing spin reasons. These include 'total number of signups' (Second Life's 9M number comes to mind, as does the 80M Habbo Hotel number) to 'active users in last x days' to 'paying subscribers'. Many companies do not advertise the numbers at all, like Moove.
3) "Let me see some ID, kid!"- For some reason the industry has begun pushing an artificial boundary between 'kids worlds/games' and 'adult worlds/games'. This may just be a simple case of wanting to push the large kids worlds into a different category to make other worlds look larger (in their weight class).
4) "The Medium is the Message"- If you want to see a virtual world platform vendor get red in the face, mention some subscriber numbers from casual web/flash-based games. They will argue endlessly how they are two different species and do not deserve to be contrasted against each other. Ditto for social networking sites like Bebo who are re-skinning their social networking portals with some rudimentary avatar chat.
I'm going to waltz right in to the Lion's den at this point, and make some proposals for some common semantics and conclusions so we can at least harmonize the concepts we are talking about. This way, the people we are talking to don't need a decoder-ring to separate the hype from reality.
1- Name
Who cares what it is called! Honestly.
Call it Virtual Worlds, 3D chat, Applesauce. As Randy Farmer said to me, "You don't need to be 3D to be an avatar." What we are talking about is people connecting with each other, either pre-arranged or spontaneous, for educational, business or recreational purposes, with everything from cartoonish-lego avatars with text to photorealistic avatars with spatial voice. If they are playing Mahjong or going on a WoW raid, they are connecting with each other. If they bump into each other in the Wondermark-meets-Terry-Gilliam-looking ff0000 world or in Second Life, they still connect. Then we can devolve into the 'which interaction is more signal-rich', when comparing text-chat+canned-2D-avatars against uncanny-valley-photo-realistic-avatars+wideband-audio-chatting
Recommendation- Companies will call their offering whatever is hot and trendy (many dot-com busts in the Valley were red-hot again after they re-treaded themselves as Web 2.0 companies) and nothing we do is going to change it. The market will sort it out, don't intervene.
2- Users
The answer has to be around 'active users'. Total number of downloads/signups is pure fiction, no equivocation. Paying subscribers is a nice standard convention, but precludes use by free and ad-supported implementations. So, lets talk about 'unique individuals (excluding alts) who have been on longer than 2 minutes in the last 30 days'. There, simple and easy. There will be people who mask their alts, so there will be some double-counting, but that's ok. We will then not count people with one account and ten avatars, pets, whatever.
Why is this important? Three reasons:
- Young users go where their friends are. Watch teenagers and IM platform usage and you can see the cliques based on a top-down graph of IM-platform usage and friend-lists on MySpace. Other curious monkeys like myself will go to where my friends are not, so I can explore. I'll need to know enough about the heterogeneity of a platform to decide to go there or not.
- When you are talking about content creators going to a platform, be they users creating content or content firms like Sony, they make their platform decision based on the amount of people there. Individuals may want to freedom to create in a small community, whereas Sony will follow the Windows-developer creedo and aim for the place with the most users.
- When we talk about people advertising in these worlds (as distasteful as we all may believe it to be, it is happening), they will require hard metrics to determine how much the platform/intermediary will be paid.
Until we all agree on some common conventions about measuring users, then we have our current problem, which is that when you add up 47 of the major virtual world platforms, the total advertised users exceeds the population of all of North America. This may be true, especially when you add in Korea and China worlds, but we'll need to show bigger rigor in our bookkeeping before we can light the fireworks and break out the martinis.
Recommendation- If you want to be counted in the future major tracking indexes (Chris Sherman and Nick Wilson, this opportunity has your names all over it), use the 'unique users in the last 30 days' metric. This is why section two of the Wall Street Journal isn't denominated in fifty different currencies, but a single common denominator.
3- Age
Newsflash- Not all avatars in Second Life are over 18 years of age.
Newsflash 2- Not all users of childrens sites are young children, or else there would be no market for a mobile phone widget for Webkinz, as most young children do not carry web-enabled smartphones (yet).
There is too much crossover between games, with kids and adults playing puzzles, and kids and adults exploring virtual worlds. MySpace is a good example of how hard it is to segregate 'grown-ups' from 'children', as there are probably more young teenage male fans of Led Zeppelin than Gen X'ers. Habbo Hotel is a quaint, lego-like cartoon environment that hosted the Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Ozborne, in March. I suspect all the pre-teens were expecting his cute little lego-avatar to bite the head off a lego-bat.
Recommendation- My advice is to implement a common identity model (OpenID is a great start), plus an industry self-imposed rating system for content like the ESRB, and implement it quickly before some government somewhere decides that it is their responsibility to 'protect the children from the Charleston, Jazz, Elvis, the Beatles, Internet porn, and online games' again.
Entertainment and Socialization are general enough concepts that you cannot segment platforms or sites based on an entirely subjective age-range. I hope we don't even try any further than we already have.
4) Medium
Ok, so immersive virtual worlds like Kaneva, Makena, and Second Life are unique snowflakes that deserve some treatment different than the avatars in web-based platforms like IMVU or Metaplace?
There are already a number of companies, including IBM, that are building chat gateways into SL, so you can communicate with your SL brethren from outside the grid. What happens when there are more people using the web-based chat client into SL pseudo-twitter than there are concurrent avatars 'in world'?
What happens when voice gateways connect Skype or the PSTN to There.com voice?
What about mobile virtual worlds from your iPhone? What about other hybrid use-cases?
Then the boundary between the virtual world and the real world becomes very permeable and the distinction between web-based and proprietary-immersive-free-roaming-worlds becomes very small.
Tish Shute mentioned to me this morning that the entire conversation around this to date also discounts the impact of P2P implementations, which I completely agree with.
Recommendation- Count them all together, as they are all facets of the same diamond. Lets rationalize this industry soon so we can 'skip to the end' of the platform wars and focus on the useful content piece. Imagine if we had debated HTML vs. 49 other options for a decade before de-facto deciding on HTML. Shudder.
And the only thing worse than multiple competing proprietary platforms is multiple competing open standard platforms. I understand why companies keep claiming themselves as a platform, but we are rapidly approaching over-population of the ecosystem, and there is neither flora nor predators enough to sustain the quantity of fauna popping into this industry.
In the immortal words of Dennis Miller, 'I rant therefore I am'. Here endeth the rant.
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