I was ready to move on from Facebook, with Inara Pey frowning at me on her blog, and Hamlet Au covering different angles over at New World notes, I was all Facebooked out, but, in a turn of events not related to privacy and more in line with some of the points Hamlet made in his New World Notes post, there’s a very interesting post over at Gamasutra about virtual worlds, social media and why the easiest pathway often wins.
What’s interesting about both the Gamastura post, and Hamlet’s post, is the numbers, the number of people using Facebook compared to Second Life is quite staggering, this is largely down to Facebook being both cheaper and easier to use than Second Life, but that only tells part of the story, World of Warcraft has something like thirteen million registered accounts, so people will engage with a client based system when the appeal is there.
Both posts point out that at one stage Second Life was considered best placed to capture the largest share of the market, with 3D worlds set to replace 2D webpages, and that will happen eventually, whether Second Life is that 3D platform is a different matter because they were ahead of their time with their ambitions and now have issues with trying to scale. However this will happen one day, and it will be easy to participate and will be the path of least resistance. There was a time when people poured scorn on Amazon for having a website and felt that angle had no legs.
However, where Second Life lags behind Facebook is in the basics, and as the Gamasutra article points out, it’s easier to type a web address into your browser than it is to download a client, familiarise with your environment, customise your avatar and then move on, this is less appealing than simply finding a webpage to the casual customer. There are also issues such as communication, whereas in Facebook and even Twitter, you can login and find messages sent to you, Second Life messages get capped, they aren’t all easy to manage, notecards go to your notecard folder where you then have to check who they’re from, whereas the concept is futuristic, communications are decidedly behind the times.
Where Second Life has an edge however is in presentation, take for example when Terry Pratchett visited. This works perfectly in Second Life, because of the limitations which meant such a Q&A session wasn’t overran and because it felt like a gathering and this is an area where Second Life can be used to great effect. However for the time being at least, Linden Lab are better off looking at how they can expand their current appeal, rather than trying to be all appealing and this therefore means grasping the concept of a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush.
This brings us back to the delectable Ms. Pey, who has an excellent blog post about Second Life, here. Inara makes an excellent observation there:
“It’s been said a thousand times before in a thousand different ways, but the key to Linden Lab’s success is its existing user base. Rather than looking back at the past peaks of concurrency or the number of Big Businesses that popped their heads into SL (however briefly), and looking at the means to attract and retain them once more, Linden Lab should really be focused on one thing, and one thing only: providing a better experience for its existing user base.”
Quite, whereas in the past Linden Lab seem to have obsessed over figures suggesting large swathes of people don’t stay, and working to woo them, it has at times been at the expense of existing users. Naturally a business will wonder why someone doesn’t stay, but at the same time they need to look deeply into why people do stay. Chasing Facebook or World of Warcraft type numbers is futile at this moment in time, economic figures suggest the world is stagnating and this is worrying, as Hamlet rightly points out in the comments on his blog post:
“What’s worse, it’s not growing and not being replenished. With so many older Residents, this 100K will start being depleted naturally as people retire and/or scale back their income.”
In other words, long term stagnation isn’t an option because it will inevitably lead to shrinkage. However short term it does allow a bit of breathing space, what is needed now is impetus and that’s where it all gets a tad tricky. Mesh will improve content, but that in itself won’t increase usage, because Mesh quite frankly to a consumer, isn’t sexy. The issue in Second Life remains what to do next and whereas there are plenty of places to visit, is there really enough for people to do? Large swathes of Second Life are made up of people renting or leasing land and doing their own thing, with their own imagination but there are large swathes of people who prefer pre-defined paths or more engagement and quite frankly, the technology for a basic and easy to use point and click style adventure game still doesn’t exist within Second Life. Combat requires HUDS and addons, it’s not intuitive and systems vary greatly in their usage.
Whoa, backup a minute Ciaran, just a minute ago you were complaining that LL should deal with existing users first, and yes, they should, they should fix search, stop fiddling with it, assist people in getting the right maturity settings and stop giving merchants so much to do that limits their creation and promotion of their wares, but that doesn’t mean the whole of Second Life needs to stand still.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’d like to see LL offering database hosting as a paid service and tying that into profiles for those who engage with certain systems so that we can build an achievement system like World of Warcraft has, a lot of the achievements in WoW are basically about number counts so it’s nothing that has to be overly taxing. That sort of thing of course isn’t for everyone, which really should be the point of Second Life, large options about what you want to be.
Ideally at some point, sims or estates in Second Life will be known for their own brand and names, rather than Second Life as an all singing, all dancing, umbrella. They’d have signed up for a gameworld, or a discounts on live entertainment, they are attracted not so much by the Second Life logo, but what they can do here. However the problems of finance regarding an entertainment venue in Second Life are well documented.
However I’m getting ahead of myself here, Linden Lab do need to grasp the thorny nettle of why people remain here and, warts and all, and accept that nettle as a base to grow from. There are also things people inworld can do to create new and attractive actvities, we shouldn’t wait for Linden Lab to lead us here and many people are working away at new angles right now, trying to attract more people to their sims.
Whereas Second Life isn’t Facebook, or WoW, it’s certainly far from dead and there’s still plenty of potential.
I wouldn’t say I was frowning specifically at you; more the general viewpoint that anything and everything connecting, however remotely, SL with Facebook is “bad”. I personally, as stated, don’t use Facebook. Never have, probably never will; I do find the service itself – or the ethics of its creator – odious.
BUT…social networking is seriously flawed in SL, and in many respects it needs to be considered as a whole – together with all the nice Shiny like incoming Mesh, etc., – if LL are to stimulate some form of growth. Really that was the bottom line of my article you so kindly linked to.
Give us the means to be *engaged* in SL, Linden Lab, and we’ll stick around. What’s more, *we* will be the means by which SL will go “viral” in attracting new users, as we’ll want our friends to come share in the opportunities and fun that SL holds.
Technical options are a means to an end, and this is where I feel LL do face a challenge in overly listening to the user base: if they do so too much, they’re just going to end up with a shopping list of technical WIBNIs that, while ease day-to-day life in SL (smoother sim crossings, improved search tools, raised Group limits, improved Group chat) – but which *don’t* actually contribute to re-engaging with the user base on a deeper, more long-term basis.
The view has to be taken holistically: the technical with the social (rather than, again has been the perception) one at the expense of the other. And user feedback, despite my own (and other people’s negative views on such, *should* form a discrete part of this process.
Here again is where part of the LL model is wrong. It is one thing to overhaul the web-based marketplace and (potentially) make it a better, smoother experience (despite the hiccups). But it is quite another to drive users to that environment *at the expense* of in-world consumer activity. Doing so, as we’ve seen, actively damages the in-world economy. True, it may not not have been a the usual “sky is falling” way most doom-and-gloom posts predict, but it *does* contribute to the on-going stagnation of the platform, in as much as store owners are increasingly discouraged to maintain in-world stores, land is abandoned (one way or another) and Mainland and private sims alike become increasingly lonely places.
Mesh – again as discussed elsewhere – will find a niche, but as a concept that could “save” SL, it is deeply, deeply flawed; not only because the the specialist time needed to learn how to model, etc,, – but because *it takes people out of SL in order to achieve anything*.
Similarly, simply stopping the fiddling with maturity ratings and the like isn’t going to lead to any growth. Sure, it will calm things down for a while (until the next crisis) – but useless made a part of a cohesive strategy, born out of a (sorry to use the term again) holistic view of Second Life, things aren’t going to change.
LL, at its most senior levels has lost the plot. SL has matured fair beyond the image they originally had for it, that it has passed their understanding. They are simply too rooted in the past – hence the straw-grabbing “strategies” that have marked recent years: “The First Hour” and “Fast, Fun, Easy”. Ad the same time, on the technical level, SL is not being seen as an interconnected *whole* – but rather as a series of independent technical challenges. Some of these we’ve pester LL about for years, true enough.
But LL are the gatekeepers to the garden of Second Life. They need to understand what lies within their walls, and they need to act accordingly, nurturing what is here. If they do that, we’ll be able to appreciate, contribute, sustain, and grow the environment.