When Bella Yan wore an African skin for several months last spring, I got the impression that her large stature made an even more powerful statement in the gatherings in Second Life.  Certainly, her presence made an impact on those who observed her, but I did not get any particularly pointed comments or experienced any slights as a result of her new skin. 

Here is the text of the announcement (with some of my own notes thrown in, in blue):

Why is the National Science Foundation spending money to investigate virtual worlds? Well, millions of people are already wastingspending billions of dollars in these alternate realities, and we really don't know much about the sociological or psychological dynamics within them. A couple weeks ago, I actually had a barely worth-mentioning discussion (in real life) with Johnny Sagan about the future of Second Life, There.com (where this experiment was conducted), etc.

The basic argument was whether people really would spend more and more time in these virtual worlds as years went by. He said yes, they allowed people to live in what is essentially a waking dream and be incredibly creative, and that's too enticing to not do. (Apologies to Johnny for oversimplifying in the cause of brevity.) I don't entirely disagree, but I still think there's no way to predict whether Second Life will become a key part of everyday life (like email), a significant but not dominant activity (Facebook), or a very successful niche product (like World of Warcraft or Dungeons & Dragons before it). I just see too much desiret for authenticity, even among people who aren't part of the vast cultural elite liberal conspiracy. Regardless, these things clearly aren't going to go away, and it's well worth studying them.

While IM, text and email are firmly planted into our daily rituals (unless you are under the age of 21, where communication is via a social network site). Recently, the question of this convergence bubbled to the surface as I spoke with a 17 year old and found out he and his friends rarely, if never, used their email accounts? His group of friends, not unlike other people his age, supposedly converse via the platforms such as Facebook. You dont use email I asked?

Is this a tidal shift in user adoption or a "stage of life" whereas once the late teens and early collegiate kids hit the work world, their email address will become indespensible...like the rest of us? Or, will Facebook (or fill in the blank social media platform supplant email and its ilk to become the connectivity factor that is dominant?

Thinking more on this subject, if social media becomes the entry point to the web and THE platform for communcation, then a more personalized experience will gradually morphy/evolve from the static experience of today. Thus, virtual worlds (or elements of these experiences - games, sticky apps, personalization via avatars, etc) will make their way into the mainstream dialogue.

Thus, I took a look at a few of the virtual worlds that are teeming with small, but very active users. Sites such as Gaia with their bobble heads focusing on the early teen market with their sticky casual games made me think the casual game market is going to continue to explode. 

Club Penguin, geared towards the 6-14 year old was not that interesting but then again I wasnt the target demo! Hangout.net and the ability to personalize one's "room" was intriguing in that its controlled experience, ie one room (unlike Second Life's free for all) suggested personalization for the college dorm set.

There.com which was geared towards late teens, provided hip avatars that personified the zeitgeist of that age bracket - wanting to be someone much cooler than reality!  Habbo was another interesting site that focused on the early teen market and had an active chat community. I wont touch on Second Life, arguably the most profound and social developed of all sites with its DYI model and functioning currency.

Other sites caught my attention, like Moove with its edgy avatars seemingly geared towards an older audience.

Active Worlds was another DYI build and linux based for the more sophisticated EE amongst us. Zwinky, which was bought by IAC was geared entirely at the tween girl market. Other sites that hit my radar were Stardoll for the late teen demo, whose consumption oriented fashionista behaviors seemed the most likely for ecommerce based revenue streams. Kaneva with their edgy avatars had a high "cool" factor.

Google's Lively (which I couldnt access since they dont support Mac based OS....annoying) is a must see at this point, despite a lack of fanfare from those I know who have toyed with their app. Meez, a site with 3d avatars and games was another site speaking to the interactivity of entertainment and personalization,

Sites that I plan to review are Cyworld and Roma Victor (an MMORPG based on Hadrian's wall and Rome;  where in 2007, corporal punishment was instituted amongst its players for crimes against others for misdeeds).

Virtual Worlds in the near future are going to play an increasing role in our lives. The fact that Google with Google Lively its first footsteps in the digital universe continues, suggests that more has happened than just a new gimmick. The number of virtual worlds is also growing. Most of the virtual worlds in the Netherlands we hear nothing or very little about. Yet another far-from-us-bed-show? Gary Hayes is currently engaged in an investigation into virtual worlds and he has recorded his journey on YouTube. This provides a seven-minute film in which 50 virtual worlds pass the revue.

Second Life, HiPiHi, Kaneva, Twinity, ActiveWorlds, LagunaBeach vMTV. There.com, Habbo, Google Lively, FootballSuperstars, Weblin, AmazingWorlds, CyWorld, Whyville, Gaia Online, RocketOn, Club Penguin, YoVille, Webkinz, BarbieGirls, Prototerra, IMVU, Spore, vSide, Tale in the Desert, SpineWorld, Stardoll The Manor, There.com, ExitReality, Vastpark, Qwaq, PS3Home, GoSupermodel, Grockit, Croquet, Metaplace, Coke Studios, Dreamville, Dubit, Mokitown, Move, Muse, The Palace, Playdo, Sora City, Voodoo Chat, TowerChat, Traveler , Virtual Ibiza… Are you on your journey?

On his site Gary also refers to a beautiful visual of the Examination Kzero where several virtual worlds in a useful overview (jpg) are plotted against each other.

EVERYONE should be doing videos

- I have seen this video 3 times before reading the content above - andrew peters aka aplink

PS: theRedlightcentre missed a debute in the video - i wonder why ?

Virtual Greats est une filiale de l’agence Millions of Us qui a pour objectif de monétiser des produits dérivés d’artistes dans 60 mondes virtuels. Les premiers artistes signés sont Justin Timberlake, Elvis Presley Enterprises, Snoop Dogg, Paris Hilton, Raven Symone, Tila Tequila et l’incroyable Hulk. La customisation va de l’avatar entier aux détails tels que coupe de cheveux, ligne de vêtements, animations diverses, les expressions ou phrases cultes...

Un premier accord avec Gaia Online qui compte 5 millions de visiteurs uniques a été signé.

The inspiration for Virtual Greats came when I realized that this was a $1.5 billion market without any high-value copyrighted material," said Reuben Steiger, CEO of Millions of Us

Virtual Greats

There.com is located in San Mateo, and perhaps, if I had time, I'd go over to their offices when I'm in San Francisco in a few weeks for Emetrics Summit.

Victorino has been with There.com since the beginning, he's the president and COO of Makena Tchnologies that runs the platform. I didn't really have a sense of the internal operations at There.com, or so much how There.com is different, better, worse than any other Virtual World Platform I saw at Virtual Worlds 2008, but I did have a spirited conversation with him on marketing, philosophy and how virtual worlds are evolving - how brand is more powerful in virtual worlds, perhaps, than in the real 3D World.

I found it to be a very interesting conversation that lasted a full half hour and it gave me the desire to find out more about There.com.

We also talked about CC Metro and Coke 2.0, one of the branding worlds that There.com set up for Coke, but all the worlds that are set up in There.com and vMTV (Makena Technologies runs both platforms) are PG-13, unlike Second Life, which can have all kinds of content. In other words, There.com is soposed to be safe to bring you kid to, to bring anyone to, while other platforms might have content that needs to be restricted. According to the New York Times:

Coke is introducing its online island within a larger virtual world site called there.com that tries to filter out unsavory content. The company that operates there.com, Makena Technologies, uses software to censor user postings for foul language and employs a team of people to filter out content that might infringe on copyrights or fall outside a PG-13 rating. Makena, of San Mateo, Calif., says that these practices make its site desirable to advertisers.

At CC Metro, Coca-Cola customers can buy clothing and accessories for their avatars using reward points culled from codes on Coke bottle caps, which can also be used at mycokerewards.com. Customers can dress up their avatars as they move them around the island.

“It’s really bringing the offline world, where you’re drinking our products, and the online worlds together,” said Carol Kruse, vice president for global interactive marketing at the Coca-Cola Company.

One of the things I noticed is how There.com audits the creation of "user generated content" before allowing it to appear in their virtual world environments.

BTW, last year, at Virtual Worlds 2007, I attended a Lunch with There.com and wrote about the Essence of Coca-Cola and did a painting about Branding in Virtual Worlds being more powerful than real world advertising (which disturbed me, in a way) - here's the painting I did last year:

"....Now, with the help of Joe Jaffe’s agency, crayon, Coke has launched a contest, called Virtual Thirst, to design the perfect vending machine for Second Life. Rather than dispense Coke bottles, the company wants the machine to emit the “essence” of Coke—i.e., “refreshment, joy, unity, experience.” (If that sounds a little vague, at least it’s low-calorie.) A couple of video entries are posted at Virtual Thirst’s YouTube page—in these, the machines mostly give off music and light (though one offers “experiences” like a dude spinning on his head in a fire pit). All of them would look even better if I had some virtual weed. More at Jaffe Juice."

So, I gave this interview my "all" trying to summarize both Steve Victorino and my feelings about what goes on in Virtual Worlds including There.com and what they're doing with Coke.

One of the main reasons I find myself emersed in new media today is due to my love of cyberpunk as a kid.  The idea of a full virtual reality that we could plug into was just completely enthralling to me at the time.

However, though I was a very early internet adopter and user I never got excited by things like SecondLife or There.com largely because they just seemed like toy - there is nothing that one needs to do in SL and most of the possible activities are pretty much things I do in my real life.  That's all fine as a temporary escape but it doesn't emerse one in  a useful alternative world.

It is still quicker and easier to navigate the 2D web via links and scrollbars than it is to wander a Virtual town looking for the "library."

As a social alternative there is some real potential in these virtual worlds but the idea i had as a kid that we would be living part of our lives inside the machine seems silly to me now.

However, the notion of a "filter" that puts the web over the real world, like explored in Gibson's last book, Spook Country, is potentially REALLY exciting.

The tone was set by Greg Verdino from Crayon who commented that "last year I couldn't get you to stop talking about Second Life and this year I suspect you won't even mention them" before it veered off into an extended discussion of how to sell Pepsi to teens, how to sell music to teens, how to sell phones to teens, how to sell, well....you get the idea, although in fairness someone lobbed a question at them as the room was starting to clear, something along the lines of "yeah, but what about the adults" to which Wilson of There.com replied "oh yeah, they're there, only different" and the Slippcat CEO showed his street cred as an adult by admitting he played Atari when he was a kid, which is to say that having once been a kid who was marketable to, he's now equally gullible as an adult, I suppose.

Kind of like moving from Hot Wheels up the ladder to a Harley, they're still bikes, it's just the brands are maybe bigger and certainly more expensive.
(More after the fold)

The Marketers Want Your Brain
The afternoon case study was called "Capturing their Brains and Eyeballs" because, well, it's not JUST about capturing their eyeballs, you need their brains as well. And that was kind of the theme at the morning session as well, where a lot of talk was on measurement, and is virtual world advertising still valid, and is there a problem when some 40 year old is a 20 year old chick in a virtual world (they're not usually, was the response, and even when they are it's still an extension of their 'aspirations' and thus somehow indicative of brand preference, although I don't know how a 20 year old virtual chick is going to buy L'Oreal for her 40 year old male controller).

And it all came down to engagement, and how engagement is different from what advertisers usually measure, which is eyeballs, and click-throughs, and impressions, and this is where the Slippcat guy comes in because he's proposing you can have your cake and eat it too - with the Slippcat system, he envisions virtual worlds where EVERY object is clickable (and given away for free, by the way), and every click pays the clickee, and with every click those marketers get a report, and I start to picture a brand manager as being something like those business types in a black and white film, standing over a steampunk kind of globe which spits out long slips of paper with stock quotes on them, a constant endless stream of ticker tape, curling up at your feet and eventually reaching the ceiling.

Because the brand managers are trying to measure all this. And Slippcat is promising measurement - "give us your branded objects and we'll embed them with menus, and links to Web sites, and SLRLs to your until-now-empty sims, and as the hordes click and get paid, that little ticker tape will keep spitting out reports, and we'll all go home happy and wealthy, even those poor saps who did all the clicking because after all, you make peanuts on Google word search but people still throw it on their site, right?"

So now you have ticker tape to make the brand managers happy, and with all these systems and measures you can figure out not just how many times your item was clicked, but by whom, and how long they STOOD by your object, and whether they shared it with their friend, and which friends, and where did they go next.

And then you have the Habbo teens, and you get all that and more - because in addition to clicks, and proximity, and measures, and object propagation numbers you also get that cross-tabbed to research data about all those clicking, happy Habbo kids, like what their favorite phone is, or what shoes they wear, or when their birthdays are, all kinds of deep market research data cross-segmenting and slicing to your heart's content.

So you've got your clicks and you've got your demographics, now all you need is "engagement", and this is where everyone gets slightly befuddled, because you can't entirely measure engagement by how long someone is in a place, or how much they click on something, or how many friends they give their branded object to - because, well, engagement is something INSIDE.

Thank goodness they're working on that, because as Michael Wilson of there.com pointed out, the neuroscientists have been looking at the issue and have discovered that there are BRAIN patterns that show when you're engaged, so I'm assuming then that Emotiv and other systems will finally bring us the ultimate measure that all these marketers are lusting after, which is to TRULY read your brain to find out if their brand messages are making an impression.

Slippcat is Listening
Until we can run brain scans on users, Slippcat is promising to add a layer of insight on its ticker tape reports, because they're offering "buzz reports" based on chat logs.

Hmmm. OK, so the way he described this is that Slippcat is giving out items for free (oh, and remembering the senior guy in the booth told me "the content developers in SL hate us"), with the ability to click those items and earn a few Linden dollars, and with the ability for those items to teleport you, teleport someone to you, send you off to a Web site, whatever....well, turns out those items will also know whether you LOOK at them, and how close you are to them, and also what you SAY around them. Because Slippcat is extracting "buzz words and phrases" from chat logs and passing that on to advertisers, all as part of its sincere effort to better marry brand messages to users, to never push stuff that people don't want, and to properly calibrate advertising to your brain, or your engagement experience, or whatever it is they're all trying to do, at some point I kind of got lost in all the buzzy talk and metric stuff and just sort of wondered "yeah, but none of this sounds like much FUN".

MTV to the Rescue
Van Zyl played Atari as a kid. Which gave him the right to sit up there with Habbo and MTV, and which is also I guess the source of his click obsession, because what's a clickable piece of furniture if it's not a joystick button after all?

But the MTV gal was having none of this "free stuff, click me" model, and there were other sighs and rolling of eyes at the head table. Because as MTV said: "If it's good stuff, people should want to PAY for it. Look...they PAY us for campaigns, and that's the ultimate engagement".

And even Greg from Crayon piped in, asking whether all this clickable, payable Slippcat nonsense didn't "tarnish a brand"...in other words, is Nike really going to want to be handing out shoes that dole out a Linden or two, but I take it they didn't read the Slippcat literature, because they're not after Nike, apparently, they're after Office Depot.

And it really all circles down to that. Because after all the measuring and clicking and segmenting and analyzing, everyone pretty much agreed that "if you're going to do something, it had better be GOOD", and that's good news for the content creators of Second Life. Because as much as Anshe Chung has her 10L warehouse, and as much as Slippcat will end up being a sort of camping chair warehouse, there's still something aspirational, there's still something SPECIAL, about owning the best - and the best means authentic, and the best means hand crafted, and the best means developed with a deep knowledge of your target audience.

And Habbo seems to get that. And MTV seems to get that. About the only people who don't quite get it are the Lindens, because if they "got it" they'd do a hell of a better job protecting content in their world so that brands knew that they were entering an environment where objects aren't just prims, they're items of aspiration, and the object economy is based on a lot more than whether you can "get free stuff" but how, and from whom, and the channels would be protected so that the brands can come in, if they choose, and work with in-world developers to create viral items and experiences which can engage people - their eyeballs AND their brains, I suppose.

But they opened the lid - the copybots set the scene for the Slippcats. All those newbies out there don't know an Armidi from Havok4 from Windlight, all they want is some nice furniture and a new pair of jeans, and it's such an uncontained flood - a ripped off, clickable world, that the "space" has been distorted for all those big brands and big bucks.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing, maybe Second Life doesn't need the big brands and their mega bucks and measuring sticks. But it is perhaps a sign of why Linden wasn't at the big table this time, they were off in the little room participating in a discussion on "Why the 3D workspace is necessary for today's information and knowledge management professional", which either shows you that their focus has shifted into a different "space" or they didn't play Atari as kids.

Derrick J. Lang, an AP entertainment writer, explains:

LOS ANGELES - Paramount Pictures' film vault is opening up in the virtual world.

Thousands of video clips from Paramount's movie library — ranging from 'Footloose' to 'Clueless' — will be available inside the virtual 3-D online worlds of There.com and vMTV, Paramount Digital Entertainment and Makena Technologies Inc. announced Wednesday.

'Consumers today are not interested in a passive experience online,' Paramount senior vice president of entertainment Derek Broes told The Associated Press. "'ven when they are just watching a piece of entertainment, they're commenting on it or looking at it with a friend. They're very actively involved.'"

Read full story at Yahoo! News.

Via the Association of Virtual Worlds a group of passionate people are forging ahead with plans to engage a much larger community into evolving and immersive landscapes of virtual worlds. Yes Virtual Worlds in plural, no longer is Second Life the ONLY choice for people inspired by the concept of connecting with people in an engaging, meaningful and commercial manner. Advertisers and marketers literally threw money at Second Life, a wacky fantasy futuristic 3D world - without understanding why - and they were right in doing so as the world took notice. Now the hype has been exhausted, it is now time to FOCUS on how to make virtual worlds deliver concrete and sustainable communities, businesses and enjoyment.

More to come soon.... (Secret Reporter APLINK)

Images of Secret Meeting

Voici quelques captures avec dates.

Voici la source départ qui seme la confusion (d’ailleurs l’un des commentaires souligne que le propos n’est pas clair au sujet de Coca).
http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2007/12/11/aol-leaves-second-life/ 
Il suffira d’une courte reprise pour alimenter tous les fils rss
http://www.secondlifeupdate.com/2007/12/31/coca-cola-leaves-second-life/ 

Coca Cola partira peut être de Second Life mais pour l’instant ils y sont toujours et leur stratégie sur There.com et la même chose que lorsqu’un annonceur achète une campagne média sur plusieurs site web (diversification des cibles et des supports).

L’agence en charge sera ravie de voir que son client est parti sans prévenir. L’année dernière un article avait totalement inventé une histoire de conférence de presse qui dérape avec manifestation anti-dopage au sujet de Cofidis. Evidemment la conférence de presse s’etait tres bien passé d’ailleurs une vidéo est disponible et Cofidis revient prochainement.