I’ve been watching apple’s strategy and they’re doing some interesting things people hate lately. 

• iAds – a framework for doing advertising on the iPod/iPhone/iPad
• Safari 5 Reader – for clearing clutter from websites you’re reading
• Not implementing flash on iDevices – to annoy Adobe and keep “stability”

Many folk are upset about all of these. Google feels they’re locked out of apple’s devices on the advertising front. Adobe on the platform front. Advertisers in general due to reader functionality. It looks like Steve Jobs is playing “our way or the highway” on all these fonts – like he wants to own the lot. I think it may be simpler than that.

Steve Jobs hates ads. He’s got better things to do than be shouted at all day by advertisers. I tend to agree. So let’s look at these recent developments though that lens.

NO FLASH

What to people do with flash?

• They play flash games a bit
• They watch video that is often already encoded in formats that don’t need flash to watch them
• They get bombarded by the most obnoxious form of eye gouging, bandwidth sucking, animated advertising

So if flash was to disappear tomorrow we may miss Farmville, but not much else. For any utilitarian animation (infographics for instance) HTML5 will do fine in future. As for gaming there’s Unity and a bunch of other quite reasonable alternatives. We won’t miss the animated ads – advertisers will miss them. As for advertising itself… it’ll just have to shout less.

If you’re on a mobile device, with a mobile data plan, you’ll probably save money too. You pay for those high-bandwidth shouty ads, when calm, low-bandwidth ads would do.

iAds

The iDevices were slow to take on multitasking. This may be for good reason. A misbehaved background application sucks battery, and that’s an annoying thing in a mobile device. It also sucks other resources (such as cpu cycles), so the iPod would not have been nearly as successful as a gaming platform unless rogue background applications were reigned in. Now they DO have multitasking however… and it comes at a price. 

Any application which asks to sit in the background could potentially pop up something to alert you. This is where iAds comes in. Folk pay for ad free applications and services. Free applications and services often use advertising as a revenue model. This is fine on a single tasking system where only the app you’re using can spam you. on a multitasking system, seemingly inactive applications can push advertising to you. This may not be so great.

Unless there’s a framework in place to ensure the device user knows exactly why something has appeared on their screen, it’s likely they’ll blame the platform. So if popup ads suddenly appear out of nowhere, and nothing tells you where they come from, you may get rather frustrated. Any foreign advertising api could potentially do this.

So iAds is a framework to box in advertising and ensure it plays nice. I’m sure you’ll hear it spun as another apple try at total market monopoly, but it’s a framework. It’ll reign in advertising on iDevices so it obeys familiar user interface conventions. When you see an ad, you’ll know it’s an ad, and why you’re seeing it. This is important stuff. 

SAFARI READER

Ah the magic button that hides advertising – or does it. To use the reader button you wait for a web page to load first. Then if it’s legible and non-shouty you just read it…. If however it’s full of visual spam and your head feels like exploding, you hit the reader button and woosh, it becomes clean text. Now folk complain this hides advertising and rips sites of the money from their ad impressions…. but let’s unravel that.

• You’ve already seen the ads – they didn’t lose the money from those impressions
• You only bother to use reader if a website is obnoxious
• If you want to continue to browse the site you exit reader, and continue viewing any ads they show you
• If a website splits long articles into pages that are too short to read on their own in order to get more ad impressions, and is shouty, it deserves to lose subsequent impressions

I’ve been using tools like safari reader for a while now. I read a lot of stuff on the web for my work. Some sites are so full of visual noise that it helps to rip the articles out to a legible format to avoid distractions. Usually that’s when there are bobbing bald heads or car crashes of flashing dollar signs happening in the side bar. It’s not like I don’t see their ads – I’m hyper aware of them enough to want to run away to a quiet corner and poke my eyes out with a pencil. These tools don’t stop you seeing ads. They stop you from enduring them. They stop hideous ads from forcing you to click away from the site. 

MY DIRTY SECRET

I figure this isn’t a war on advertisers, nor an attempt at monopoly. I figure it’s all about keeping advertising sane. We killed the blink tag on websites long ago, only to replace it by the most heinous monster imaginable – animated popup advertising. Most of the internet bandwidth and computing power we use up browsing the web is eaten by this monster. But I’ve beaten the monster… it doesn’t bother me any more. 

I filter just about all the advertising that comes into my machine. I hardly see any of it. That is my shameful secret – and I do feel bad about it. So bad in fact that, when I find a site useful or interesting. When it has good content. When it does stuff I want to support – good news sites, small developers, interesting blogs, great services and wotnot – I TURN ADVERTISING ON. When a site doesn’t badger me like a shameful hussy, I drop the filter of trust and let that advertising into my life. I enjoy it’s quiet background chatter. It ads color to the net. But when advertising mugs me, it gets a face full of mace.

Predictions 3 and 4 were:

• Many new entrants will come… and go.
• Google will release a VW which will be wildly successful, then disappointing, then wildly successful.

These are worth looking at as a group due to the biggest surprise of the year, Google. So let’s see how Google changed the game and how, despite much prognostication, they didn’t.

Whither Google Lively

I predicted Google would enter the market, and their initial offering would be underwhelming – most initial offerings are. What I couldn’t foretell though was their spectacular exit before the years end. What could have gone so spectacularly wrong? Pretty much what you’d imagine if you removed the Google name and stepped back a few paces to look objectively. Let’s pull Lively apart and see why. (The Lively image to the left links to a larger version which gives a Second Life side by side comparison.)

If you combined the criticisms of Second Life at the time of Lively’s launch and addressed all of them, Lively was like a dot point list of what folk were saying they wanted out of a virtual world. It was:

• Simple to use
• Contained pre-made pro content
• Ran in a browser
• Wasn’t full of perverts like SL

Well for about twenty-four hours after the launch folk hand-flapped about the death of SL under the crushing weight of this new contender on the scene. At the end of that day however, many commentators started asking if it was too simple, the content library too tightly controlled, if running in a browser restricted it too much, and where all these perverts came from.

Well… let’s skip answering the last question in detail: we all know perverts come from the internet, and if you expect that suddenly a virtual world will pop up without sex in it you missed the point at internet school. Imagine the internet is a place with a large population, like say New Jersey. Now imagine New Jersey without any sex in it…ever. Ok let’s move on.

The first three points on that list are the selling points for most of the new virtual world entrants, which this year includes big new players like Sony and old stayers like IMVU (that are only just getting noticed so look kinda new.) For some context here’s Googles search data on these things for ’08 (click for further stats).

Second Life

1.00

Playstation Home

0.08

Lively

0.30

IMVU

0.43

Ok, what we’re looking at here is Google trends data, so it’s just searches and not representative of actual use. But it certainly tells us what people are Googling, which in my book is a good indicator of interest. So to put it another way – we’re looking at hype cycles. Waaay over on the left (off the graph but click thru to go explore yourself) is the initial Second Life hype spike. Exploring that is left as an exercise for the reader (but take note, SL’s hype spike was immense!) What we can see from this breakdown though can be summed up thusly:

• Google’s Lively when launched briefly spiked interest (around July) in the new “SL killer”.
• Within a month it had become about as interesting as IMVU.
• IMVU is about half as interesting as Second Life, but growing (as it has slowly steadily for years now).
• Sony’s offering on launch was about half as interesting as Lively, and quickly became less interesting.

So here we’re seeing two of my forecasts in action: Google’s initial success, then failure, which is unsurprising as excitement augurs disappointment most of the time, and Sony on the leading edge of the same hype cycle. Which begs the question, why did I include IMVU? I’m glad you asked

IMVU was one of the early virtual world light contenders to go up against Second Life. They have a good product that fulfills a niche, (exactly the niche Lively was trying to fill by the way.) I’d like to send out a hi-five to IMVU right now, for sticking to their market and continually improving their service and growing their user base for years now. So let it be known, SL isn’t the only game in town. It’s a wide market that a few players are already doing good things, and while Second Life may be the yardstick for a complex “world like” virtual world experience, IMVU sets the bar for simple social avatar chat with low barriers to entry…. but I digress.

So that’s the rise and fall… what about the rise again?

The upturn and downturn of Lively I predicted – but the yelping tail between the legs kicked dog run-away I didn’t expect. From Second Life killer to put out of it’s misery within six months was quite a surprise. Could it possibly rise from the ashes? The answer from the community is a resounding yes. Within a month of Google’s announcement they were closing the doors on the product, enthusiasts had reverse engineered the whole product and started a clone of Lively’s service a day after Lively closed the doors.

NewLively only took a month or so for a small team to build, based on different technology to the original product. It appears close to a feature complete Lively experience. This somewhat begs the question – if it only took a month to clone Lively, was it a very ambitious offering in the first place? Well if it takes a month to clone the answer is no. Evidently Google’s bet didn’t pay off, but they weren’t betting much to start with.

Personally I was incredulous when I was told about NewLively – surely the biggest name on the internet couldn’t have their product duplicated by enthusiasts in a month. Dizzy ensures me it’s quite true. So Lively lives on, and three cheers for it… may it rise again.

Whither the rest of the rabble
Well if you try to count the number of virtual worlds projects that have come onto of fallen off the radar in the last year, you’ll run out of fingers and toes. Mister KZero has far more fingers and toes than me, so go look at his maps. (If you can count them all do let me know – it’s like guess how many jelly beans in the jar, I’m sure there’s a prize.)

There’s one contender though for the biggest new entrant into the market since Second Life, and that’s Second Life…. well not really, it’s OpenSim. Mis Gwyneth makes the case that OpenSim is a valid emerging Second Life competitor (ie. the Next Big Thing) in this post, but by her own admission:

OpenSim is a reverse-engineered application running on top of .NET/Mono. What this mostly means is that the developers of OpenSim don’t really knowhow LL’s servers work. All they know is what the SL client expects to receive in terms of communication. Thus, the SL client, to a degree, defines how an OpenSim-based grid ought to work.

Now I agree with Mis Gwen’ that there is a lot of interesting things happening in OpenSim, and that it’s the most interesting general-purpose platform to pop up in recent times. (Sure there are others, but as we saw with Lively, the right bullet list of features does not a successful virtual word make.) Heck, even my boss is an OpenSim fan.

…but there’s something wrong with this picture.

The short explanation is this: if Google can fail with a virtual world by not providing anything as compelling as Second Life, then have their efforts duplicated in a month by amateurs. If there still isn’t a valid competitor on the market for whatever it is that SL does after five years of lead time. If new entrants still keep making the same mistakes. If OpenSim folk are hobyists and not building defensively. If all these things are true… then it’s not as rosy as the rose colored glasses folk keep donning when they amble into the garden of virtual worlds business to make a million green from their daisy chains.

But I digress… further breakdown of the difficulties of virtual worlds development, the limitations of some of the platform decisions being made at the moment, and the holes in the business models that are prevalent…. they’ll have to wait till future posts.

I hope my two cents has been food for thought, but there’s a lot more ground to cover before we can tie a neat bow around 2008 and make sensible predictions about the year ahead. So happy new year to all and see you next time.

Toodle pip!

2) SL service will continue to improve:

Last year ended after a long period of tinkering under the hood with SL. Major scaling problems had been hit repeatedly, and it had reached the point where The Lab were turning off basic SL services (such as inventory or teleports) to keep the grid under control. Though things were improving, the consensus was they were getting worse.

I’d put those issues down to solvable scaling problems, and many instabilities due to the infrastructure and code shifts of the Het-Grid project (designed itself to stabilize the grid once finished). I figured once that was further along things would start looking rosier. This turned out to be the case.

What I couldn’t have predicted however was a new CEO popping up on the scene, who would, as his first major action, wave his arms around and shout to the world about stability. This is a message we’ve been hearing from Phil since the go-get, but Phil’s an engineer, so his utterances about stability were always to the tune of: “We’re juggling these cats you see and we know you want the cats to stay in the air, which they mostly do, but hey, it’s cat juggling…. but we’re improving.”

Kingdon however comes from a marketing background, and in a battle for minds between marketers and engineers… well, it would be more humane to just put the engineers out of their misery quietly in their sleep beforehand. Kingdon’s stability message has been constant and unfailing. More importantly it’s been simple: “stability is our highest priority.” This has improved the incredulous public’s view of Linden commitment to stability, and probably the engineers working for LL as well (though we can’t know that for sure). Certainly the hire of Frank Ambrose who kept AOL straight shows some commitment.

So yep, stability has improved, and though slower than some would like, the SL network has grown. Just as importantly LL has been devoted to evangelizing this fact. This will come into focus next year as we see the next round of stability issues hit grids… particularly the opensim grids which some see as competition with SL.

2008 was also the “year of opensim” seeing a mass exodus from SL towards opensource alternative grids. If I had a lindy for every time I’ve heard folk say “a grid is just a database, it can’t be too hard to set one up” I’d be richer than Stroker now. Of course a grid is a database, but an SL like grid is a database which has difficult issues with exponential complexity. If it was easy, SL like grids based on other technologies would be all over the place by now.

So this year we’ll see the “stability problem” move from SL to opensim. Scaling issues will be the first indicator of the immaturity of the opensim platform, and so we’ll see scaling and stability as the main proving ground for opensim as a viable alternative platform to SL. Opensim hasn’t been built particularly defensively when it comes to scaling problems, so expect them to hit hard.

Opensim will also face stiff competition from, well SL itself, which if things go well will be packaged up into a turnkey solution you can install yourself wherever you want and run your own grid. Given a choice between running an immature and unproven platform, or buying an off the shelf system that’s had 5 years to mature, to solve problems the OSS server hasn’t even thought of yet. Well if you have no money you’ll go opensim, but if you do have money you’ll buy your way out of future headaches with the LL solution.

Interesting times ahead.

Ok I got this prediction pretty much right again. I’ll call it 2/2 so far. Looking good Tune in for the next episode to see if I get a hat-trick *crosses fingers*

Unfortunately for them they invented virtual worlds some time around 1996. I personally invented virtual worlds some time around 1992, and have the documents to prove it. Many of my friends also invented virtual worlds. In fact if we organized a meet-up of all the people I know who invented virtual worlds we’d need to hire a second bus to drive us to the venue.

So what does the worlds patent have that all of us didn’t invent? (Apart of course from mysterious unlabeled diagrams.) Well Worlds patent covers making sure the client isn’t overloaded with too much stuff, or it their words:

The client process also users an environment database to determine which background objects to render as well as to limit the number of displayable Avatars to a maximum number of Avatars displayable by that client.

… though that might mean something apart from what I imagine, as I can’t quite understand their grammar. Putting limits on a client-server system to make sure you don’t overload the client seems like such a sensible idea. I’m amazed nobody thought of it before!

In fact they did. It’s standard best practice in designing any non-trivial client-server system. Before Worlds first mentioned thinking it up the problem in their patent, the United States Military had set up a team to solve the problem. Not long after this team became a member of the Web3D Consortium to work their draft spec towards an ISO standard.

For a patent to be upheld I believe there is a requirement for the idea to be novel. When five minutes googling can turn up countless prior-art examples (such as the above) there’s obviously no novelty here.

That’s not to say that Worlds.com hasn’t innovated in some ways. Everyone designing software must innovate – coding is a process of creative problem solving on many levels, so software development is innovative by nature. The patent though describes nothing that hadn’t been done before.

Folk who know me understand that I have a jaded view of intellectual property law, and expressed it in a piece for the international justice commons. To quote:

The use of patent law to stifle technological development is well documented. Arguments of this sort cite a “negative right” the patent holder gains, allowing them to exclude competitors from exploiting a similar invention they may develop independently. The legal burden of producing prior art in such cases can preclude the competition from proving their case even when they may have developed the invention first. When this is the case and a patent is contested, the competitor may be forced to cease development of the invention, or pay a licensing fee for use of the others’ IP.

I can’t see how this patent could be used any way apart from aggressively. Worlds, as an early entrant into the virtual worlds game, would be well aware of the other early developments in their emerging field. No honest software engineer would ever dare claim they were the first to invent the generic wide reaching processes described in the patent.

So this begs the question… what are Worlds.com trying to do here? Is it just trolling? Did the lawyers knock the technical guts out of their innovations? I’m not quite sure.

— UPDATE:

Tateru Nino posted quite a good article on the subject before me it seems. Much less ranty than mine.

1) Linden Lab will experiment with other service providers:

Originally I foresaw LL creating “mini colabs” at international ISP partner locations. I pointed out Australia’s Telstra as a likely early test candidate, as it is a national ISP and telco, was throwing a lot of resources into SL, and a great test candidate on the technical front. Australia is about as far from the USA as possible, so if they could extend their current California-Texas link to Aus and make it work, they could make it work anywhere. (They have a third colab currently at another location but I don’t know anything more about it.. testing servers?)

Well I got it half right, that was their actual strategy it seems, but Telstra is still waiting, and the hosting package they had been promised is about 18 months late. Australia probably started to look like too much of a liability too along the way when it became evident that internet service was so poor that it became an election issue. Singapore is now looking like they’ll get first dibs on a local colab, and as the most broadband connected small nation on the earth they’re a good initial market.

The Lindens are currently alpha testing a “behind the firewall solution” for SL, which means they’ve packaged up the server side so it can be run elsewhere. They have two alpha testers, but of course nobody can tell us who they are for due to confidentiality of course. When it is announced I’d bet a few lindies one of them has telco or ISP interests.

So, did LL experiment with other service providers? From a business perspective yes. It seems they had already quietly laid the business foundation to work with Telstra Australia when I made this prediction. … as far as having any practical outcome from this initiative… maybe not so much. Everyone is still waiting on the tech.

Recently however LL has started making a lot more encouraging noise about the infrastructure required to support a more distributed grid so it would be unsurprising to see announcement about practical non LL hosting initiatives pretty soon.

So I’ll be charitable to myself and say I got this one right. They have obviously laid the business foundation for it, but were let down on practical implementation by the technology. They’ve been working throughout the year though to fill that technology gap so it appears to still be a strategy. Lucky I called it an “experiment” in my prediction … the experiment failed, but it appears they’re still trying

I can understand the arguments they put forth but really… they require some extremely broad assumptions about what marriage, cheating, and other such things are. We find this in quotes like “if cyber-cheating is egregious and leads to a regular pattern of cruelty in the marriage, or causes the cyber-cheater to abandon completely his marital responsibilities”. Sounds reasonable enough, but let me explain.

Cyber cheating doesn’t legally constitute adultery, but it’s certainly trying it on for size. Someone happy in a monogamous marriage who isn’t prone to it already won’t cheat at all. Someone who is unsatisfied however, or feels the drive to, may very likely experiment with the idea – especially in the “safe and anonymous” space that VR and the internet provide. This being the case, cyber cheating can’t be the “cause” of someone giving up their marital responsibilities. Folk who choose to give them up do so despite the fact that they cheat on the internet. Cyber cheating does not cause abandonment of responsibilities as they are both symptoms of a greater marital problem.

None of this is surprising really. Helpful folk who give us tips for what to look for in a cheating spouse usually site “demand for privacy” as an indicator. Whilst this could be an indication that they have something to hide, it is also possible that they really need some space. Retreating to an online world where their spouse is not privy to their every move is a natural response to irresolvable marital pressures. This is the same sense of claustrophobia which can be a contributing factor in the attractiveness of extra-marital affairs – if not in VR then perhaps ordered out of the catalog of prospective (and discreet) partners offered by online dating agencies. Should the marriage problem remain unresolved it is highly likely that escapist behaviors, be they simple things like retreat from engagement with the partner to complex behaviors such as adultery, will continue and escalate.

Mis Kimberly Young wouldn’t agree with me though. She runs the Center for Online Addiction Recovery in Pennsylvania and has written a book on dealing with a partner cyber cheating. For her the affair as the root cause of that withdrawal from engagement with a partner that I describe as a symptom of broader relationship issues. Like the idea of too much time on the internet as an actual “addiction” (which clinically it isn’t) it creates victims out of folk, implying that some external thing outside the self is the cause of the problem. It is a dis empowering way of looking at things. For people already feeling dis empowered and trying to get away from real world problems in virtual spaces, it is an attractive but dangerous admission. Focusing on an all consuming online life or affair as some problem one can’t control is perhaps less useful than focusing on other aspects of their life that they may have been ignoring. Focus on the problem in this instance simply takes more time and energy away from solving it.

So my argument is this: having a cyber affair is exactly the same thing as having a real one, though perhaps safer and somewhat stranger. But that’s not the point really because people don’t have affairs unless they want to. “I was drunk” is not an excuse, and so neither is “I was on the internet”. Really, even completely sober and real life,the affair itself is less important than the effect it has on the individuals involved. Societal norms and the law shouldn’t be dictating how a married couple comports themselves, plays around, or forgives each other for their transgressions. That some of it might happen on the internet is neither here nor there.

There is one very sensible thing we can gain out of that article though: if your lover starts to sleep wierdly, demand privacy, ignores their chores, starts lying, changes their personality, loses interest in sex, or stops investing in the relationship then watch out! It’s time to reassess if there might be a problem with your marriage. Because if they aren’t having an affair already, and the underlying problem IS the marriage, sooner or later a holiday with someone else will start to look attractive.

You’ll notice I’ve set a few in bold – they’re what I consider serious multi-purpose free-form virtual worlds, as opposed to games or kids stuff. I’m creating a distinction between a VW’s, MMOG’s and avatar based chatrooms here. I’ll also concentrate mostly on Activeworlds and Secondlife, as they’re the worlds i’ve been most active in and am familiar with.

First onto what I’ve left out so you understand my reasoning.

Barbie, whyville, Disney etc are pretty much gaming worlds with a social focus. They’re avatar, chats and so not revolutionary. As a matter of fact they’ve been around since the early ninties, and even in primitive forms in the late 80s. In that way they’re not particularly virtual worlds.

Kaneva is facebook or myspace in 3d, so not a general purpose virtual world either. In that sense IMVU is similar but just scrapes it in on user generated content. From what I can tell WhyVille less so.

As for Entropia, often lauded as a general VW just like the big boys, well I’ll let their homepage speak for itself:

The Entropia Universe is more than a game. The Entropia Universe is for real. Real people, real activities and a Real Cash Economy in a massive online universe.

… looks promising so far…

Join people from around the globe who use the Entropia Universe currency, the PED, to develop their characters everyday on the untamed planet of Calypso.

… erm spend spacebucks on your character on another planet. Nope, it’s a game.

So what about the real virtual worlds?
I’ve never seen good statistics from There.com so I can’t comment precisely. What I have heard though is they’re about on par or slightly better than activeworlds, which we do know about.

Activeworlds says on their site:

Since Active Worlds is primarily an Internet-based platform, the
potential market for all Active Worlds-based products is global. We
currently have over 2 million individual users worldwide who have
downloaded the browser and visited the one UniServer we operate. We
generally receive more than 1,000,000 hits to our universe server per
day, and more than 500 new users download our browser each day. To
date more than 70,000 users have registered to be a “citizen”
of our Active Worlds universe. These users receive enhanced
capabilities in the Active Worlds environment. Users who do not register
are called “tourists.”

OK let’s get the same statistics from Linden Labs and see what the difference is (keeping in mind that activeworlds has been around a lot longer so their total premium accounts figure is going to be higher.

Linden Labs economic statistics page for today says: Total Residents 11,849,438. That’s sign ups, so not counting alternate accounts (2 million by the best estimates i’ve heard) it means that secondlife has attracted just under ten million individual users to sign up for an account. That’s a guestimate, but a pretty good one. So unique logins alone that puts SL about five times the size of activeworlds (which claims 2 million). This doesn’t take into account the fact that activeworlds has been online since 1995 (see history) whilst SL has only been active this century, making it somewhat younger for such a startling figure.

The difference in growth rate can easily be seen by comparing signup rates. Activeworlds boasts 500 new users each day, which may well be mostly unique. From what I can see Secondlife boasts about 15,000 signups a day, which is down from the peak average around 20,000 a day last year, but even so. If we don’t get tricky with the numbers somehow (eg. throw a few away for alt accounts) it simply looks like SecondLife is growing at thirty times the rate of ActiveWorlds.

Total accounts also doesn’t factor in that people leave. All those eleven-million sl accounts have arrived since I’ve been in world (just over 18 months). Activeworlds has a long history, and has been trading since 1995 as a virtual world, and 2001 as a commercial one. The average churn rate for VW users who do become residents is about six months according to some. We must assume that many of those accounts have left activeworlds over that time and a significant proportion of their two million residents are no longer there. This has happened to secondlife as well, but over a much shorter period.

To summarize this point – SecondLife has about as many fake accounts as Activeworlds has total accounts. When it comes to real accounts the difference is staggeringly large. If you imagine that over the 12 or 7 years the activeworlds figures represent, some users have left, then the difference in size between SL and AW are obvious. You’ll notice in the figures from the top ten at the start of this post, all the virtual worlds I’ve pointed out are about the one million users mark.

So if it’s not the total accounts figure it must be something else. If it’s premium accounts or active accounts… let’s see.

Well it’s not as simple as that – to be a member of activeworlds you have to pay to do anything apart from stand around in orange overalls (from memory). So since 2001 there have been 70,000 users registered to be a “citizen” of activeworlds. Many may no longer be paying. We can compare that to two figures in SecondLife, neither of which is particularly illuminating except to create a stark contrast.

If we compare paying secondlife customers then we’re onto “premium accounts”. I only have the published economic statistics for last september, but at that time 91,015 residents were paying for premium accounts. That was for that month, not over the entire history of SL. Some come, some go. If we knock off the churn for activeworlds it looks quite different.

Pulling the “6 month average churn” figure out of the aether (well out of the mouth of Corey Bridges from Multiverse actually) we’d assume AW’s active premium accounts would be much closer to 10,000. As SL’s premiums have continued to grow since september (with a brief dip recently) we can assume that SL has about ten times as many paying customers as AW. However you don’t have to be a paying customer to live in SL, earn virtual cash and do stuff….

The other figure that probably compares better with activeworlds residency is SL “active users”. They can do everything premiums can do apart from own land. We can be generous with AW and say that – back of the napkin – there might be quite a few folk who might wish to run around in world without any powers or rights and just chat. Let’s say that’s 20,000 or so. We compare that to the number of folk who’ve run around SL in the last fortnight and we get Residents Logged-In During Last 14 Days – 508,561. So there’s a big difference again. LL defines active residents as those who have accumulated at least 60 minutes in the last 60 days so it’s probably closer to 1.25 million in the figures they publish in their PR.

So there you have it. Based on solid figures from Linden Lab and some guestimates from Activeworlds, the active user base of SecondLife is about sixty times the size of activeworlds. Q.E.D. … well not quite.

These figures however, are patently wrong. This is partly due to the difficulty of getting propper statistics out of these companies, and partly cause of something I spilled on the napkin while working them out. Then again my estimates here are in stark contrast to those of the original article which says they’re both about a million. I know my figures aren’t exactly right, but I suspect neither of us has the whole picture. My best guess is that his stats are also wrong. Given that activeworlds still services their population with “one UniServer” while LL bought online “over 9,000 server CPUs” this year alone, I’d say my figures are closer to the truth.

This is not to poke fun at Mr Van Der Wal, simply to alert anyone who cares to read it that virtual worlds figures aint what they put in the PR. There’s plenty of very poor press going around with very silly numbers in it, both from the news makers, and the virtual worlds folk themselves. Given the poor acuracy of the numbers in the press you’ll often find reputable sources getting the stats very wrong indeed.

I encourage anyone following virtual worlds for professional purposes, and SecondLife in particular, to keep an eye on Mis Tateru Nino’s posts in Massively. She can be relied on to cut through the lard when it comes to silly numbers.

Tags: secondlife, statistics, marketing

regarding SL and VW’s. Of course I chimed in – but I’ll repost them here for posterity.

My top 3 headlines for…..

THE GEEK BLOGS

1) Linden labs opens jabber gateway into secondlife instant messaging client.
Hilarity ensues.

2) Education boffins laud html on a prim…
in principle.

3) Trans-metaverse avatars protest having to leave their weapons at customs.

THE MAINSTREAM PRESS

1) Virtual Worlds Next Big Thing – like myspace
(but nothing like it really we just said that to get your attention.)

2) Virtual Worlds Cesspit Of Degenerate Illegality –
(err not really we just said that to get your attention again.)

3) Terrorists Plan Virtual Terror –
(eeeeh is this gonzo thing still working or do we need to start paying for research from now on?)

THE BUSINESS PRESS

1) Corporates turn to virtual worlds to get things done as facebook suffers productivity killing zombie apocalypse.

2) Government economists move to establish tax rates on Netherweave, Isogen, Prism Power.

3) As corporations leave VW’s in droves, cottage MDC industry reports record growth, as does litigation for profit.

Well they’re my predictions for headlines in 2008. I think they’re a shoe in

1. Linden Labs will experiment with other service providers:
   
   Telstra Australia comes to mind but there’ll be more. My money’s on Japan or Brazil as the folk they want to get on board but my money’s on Australia as the beta.

   Folk in the internet industry understand that they need a strong technology partner with a small population so Australia gets used as a beta for phone systems, broadband and other such experiments which often go nowhere. It’s eager and tech-progressive enough to be interesting but small enough to lose should things go pear shaped. LL’s technology partner here has money to burn and is hungry to retain monopoly so they’ll make it attractive to LL.

   The lindies already run colabs so they’ll be looking at this from a technology perspective as well. They want to understand how database replication will work transcontinental – their “het grid” project is about making this easier (among other things). Trans-continental colabs will make Cali-Texas seem like a dream. Some sensible engineer at LL will tell them “please don’t do this in Europe or Asia if you want to keep your team” and they’ll take notice. Though I say Aus’ is a good bet here, if your country fits the criteria of progressive but disposable it could be you.

2. SL service will continue to improve:
   
   “What what WHAT?!?” you say. You heard me right – things are getting better. Het grid work is like restumping a sagging house. Cracks appear in the walls, things look really bad, the roof leaks, you end up having to spend weeks living at your aunties while the builders do something heinous and scary, etc… I’ve tossed my coin and come up optimistic about this. When the work is done it’ll look a lot better.

   The reason I say this is because LL has competition now and they’re obviously tinkering with their team, direction, partnerships, and of course the nuts and bolts. They’re not kids anymore, and not so reactionary – they’re growing up. A year ago anyone in the industry (and it’s not virtual worlds like we think it is, it’s relational database hosting) was shaking their heads in disbelief about how they were doing things. Now they’re not – they may not like performance but they’re not criticising LL’s approach.

   This will start to pay off this year in stability and scalability. Naysayers will still say nay, commentators will continue to say “the damage has been done” – but it will be improvement, and it will take more than one damage to break this thing. By years end it will look a lot better.

3. Many new entrants will come… and go:
   
   You don’t have to be a massive SL fanboy to realize that the newcomers into this market have a lot of mistakes to make before they get anywhere. LL has made their share of mistakes – heck they’ve made almost every one in the book – but they’re still writing it. Newcomers will avoid some of the mistakes LL has made but most of them will (after initial hype) trip on their shoelace and fall on their face. Some will do quite well thankyou: which brings me to….
   
4. Google will release a VW which will be wildly successful, then disappointing, then wildly successful:
   
   Everything google does these days is “the end of” whatever – as if some lumbering giant could come into the market and eat all the young. Six months to a year later “google office disappointing – will not replace MS office”. Honestly who writes these things? Let me answer that rhetorical question. Pundits write these things, and they’re clueless (though well circulated and paid thanks).Linux is slowly eating MS, OpenOffice is slowly eating MS Office, Apple is slowly eating the record industry – Sony hates this. But all this stuff happens slow enough that they shouldn’t sneak up and take anyone by surprise unless their head’s buried in the sand. Google will do good with their vr eventually, but sketchup hasn’t replaced autocad yet, and neither will google’s launch replace SL.
   
5. Vastpark will do well:
   
   They got some things right – they’ll do ok in the long run. It’ll be slower than fanboys think, but they’re a strong contender with the advantage of developing without too much legacy code. There’s still a content creator vs. resident divide though so we’ll have to wait for some kids raised on counter-strike level design to tinker with it and give anyone a compelling reason to be there.
   
6. A national government and a major corporation will engage in a legal action related to SL and make complete fools of themselves:
   
   Erm… both of those have already happened several times, but the public eye will be watching. If it’s towards the end of the year it may involve another VW on the upswing of it’s hype cycle – watch out google
   
7. Media pundits will coin a new phrase to describe SL and VW’s so they can stop cramming it into the same box as web2.0ish social media:
   
   Well, bloggers will do this, but cheapskate journalists will finally take notice – that’s where they source all their stuff anyways these days. The term “social media” and other vogues in reference to VWs will start to take on the distaste we currently have for terms like “cyberspace” to describe the internets – an outmoded term from the olden days only used by your clueless auntie trying to sound cool, or institutionalised academics writing their fourth doctorate. Discourse on the real impact of virtual worlds and social web applications will be enlivened by this change. It will also help business understand how VW’s fit into their marketing and customer contact model.
   
8. The first SL based internet meme will enter the public vernacular:
   
   YES! WE CAN HAS OUR OWN LOLCATS. Some joke or started in SL will jump ship and turn up in your aunties mailbox, facebook or myspace. It will spread like wildfire. We will briefly fall in love with it as our own, but eventually lose respect and hate it so much we look fondly back at those innocent days of nigerian mail scams and dramatic chipmunk crossposts.
   
9. Health and support for the disabled will be a growth area in SL particularly, and VW’s in general:

   This will have mainstream media support… eventually. A series of copycat articles will flood news channels at some point, repainting the model of VW residents from pasty socially bereft young males, to your aunt, sister, grandfather and others who might have non-gamer reasons for being there.

   The use of SL by the disabled or infirm to “get out of the house” will be lauded as a positive. The converse, of allowing care givers and counsellors access to those who can’t get to their offices will also be leveraged and publicly documented.

   This will be a part of a larger trend to recognize the social value of technologies previously considered isolating – like giving old folk a nintendo wii at their old folks homes, it aint about playing solo quake, it’s about engagement in a group. The public and the media will finally start to “get it”.

   This trend will play out in education as well, but the more rigid requirements of the edu arena will mean isolated uptake – not all the tools they need are there yet for widespread adoption outside narrow applications.

Well there’s my predictions for ’08 – in no particular order and so on. I hope you get something out of them, if only waggling your fist and sayin: “That Pav’s got no idea!”  I’m sure someone’ll burn a few calories doin that before this post hit’s the wayback machine.

Well happy new year anyways. May it be a good one. Toodle Pip!

My thoughts:

1) LL will not opensource in 2008 – I think they’ll partially opensource but they’ll never completely opensource their server tech. Their business model rides on it. But they will opensource enough to allow interoperability, under the influence of the IBM parthership on technology, as that IS in their interest and gives their platform competative advantage.

2) Yups – they’ve announced interoperability and they’ll move on that as quick as they can, which will be slow But given a year I think we’ll see something.

3) Indeed 2008 will not be the year kaneva and other neiche worlds take off, but will be the year that folk figure out that there may be some kinda use for them. It’ll be the year that these startups start to realize that their walled garden aproach is going to stunt most of their growth and start making moves on inter-world connectivity. New worlds are more effort to join than new web2.0 apps and nobody want’s to deal with all the multiple clients. Phones will grow this year as wap2.0 takes off. If i had the money i’d be buying stocks in thumb medication and spectacles.

4) LL will open up another grid. FIC theory asside I think this is a solid prediction. I’d bet you a lindy IBM might be a “special friend” in this instance. Folk say they have their own grid and tech, but they’re well known for developing multiple technologies that compete for the same space anyways.

5) A blackout will mess with virtual worlds – I think there’ll be some kinda disaster, these things happen and statistically we’re due for one. When it happens I think virtual worlds will be the least of our problems. Local banking and comms chaos, and financial markets reacting to say the sudden disapearance of wall street for a day, would probably distract folk long enough from VR that they wouldn’t miss it too much while it was gone.

6) Rumors of the demise of SL have been greatly overblown. It’ll keep chugging along and the lowered expectations will allow it to continue to do what it does best rather than beeing seen as the next big thing. People will start to use it for useful stuff rather than exciting stuff (and social things are useful too from a utilitarian perspective.) So SL will steadily grow in a meat and 3 veg kinda way.

7) an attempt WILL be made to sue for fraud regarding the banks in SL. This is because at some point someone will have forgotten to tick all the indemnity boxes in their “contract” for services in sl. Further to Prok’s prediction I think a parliamentary probe will prompt a government to try and legislate in some kind of way regarding virtual worlds and property, currencies, buisiness practices. This will cause leftie activists to get up in arms about said legislation. This will not be because they’re lefties, but because governments just don’t get it, and everyone will be a bit upset about it. That is unless they’re the litigous types that stand to make a buck out of suing folk because of the changes in law, or gain competitive advantage due to increased legislative burden on their competition.

a libel suit will be filed – considering how litigous folk are becomming about next to nothing I think this is a good bet.

9) I disagree. There seems to be no slowing in the growth in litigation around IT contracts, intellectual property, and general legal opportunism. There will be other Stroker Serpentines who do have a legal leg to stand on who will win, and that’ll renew the hopes of those folk who seek to legislate or legally poke virtual world businesses for revenue.

This includes governments, and while some will seek to tax virtual worlds the competetive advantage will go to those countries that leave them alone (as vw business bottom lines will be 10-30% better off in terms of running costs, which can be passed on to their clients/consumers). Those who implement VAT will find that the cost of implementing it, accounting it, and the impossibility of enforcing it produce significant competetive disadvantage as it drains money from service provision into accountants pockets and prompts offshoring.

10) I’ll have to trust Prok when it comes to speculation on the real estate markets.

11) China !!! but not SL. South East Asia too – there will be virtual worlds with much higher per capita penetration and truly staggering populations – but they’ll be isolated to language groups that use non roman or cyrillic alphabets (ie ones that use characters for words rather than an alphabet). This is more due to the funamental difference in the way folk type and the difficulty of adapting language services to the many idiosyncratic input methods these languages use.

12) big corporations will not be using sl more. Yups, but small corporations will. Big corps already have strong slow moving communications infrastructure full of legacy systems and culture. They’ll need McKinsey on it for a year before they figure out their key messages for their internal comms rollouts and will have spent hundreds of thousands before they even move on these things. Their workers may develop local ad-hoc cultures that involve VW’s but that won’t be on the corporate radar.

Small fast moving or cash strapped companies will begin to use SL for internal communications (or other worlds). There are some things it does cheap and cheerful that cost significantly more for a pro non roll your own solution – telepresence and ad-hoc presentations for example. This will be a growth market – well not really a market, more DIY.

13) Something like a csi style murder or suicide will happen. The world is big. Just about everything happens somewhere, sometime. The odds are in it’s favour and I think this is a good bet. I shudder to think what the gonzo media will do with it.

14) The mainstream blogsphere will start using sl – yup. Non geeks are arriving in sl now. I think there’s plenty of folk who, if they have time for blogging, have enough time on their hands and are chatty enough to hang out in VW’s. When your aunt is doing it then it won’t be long before it’s well represented amongst non-geek bloggers.

15) Age verification will proceed – well a bit. For americans who seem to have the world’s largest data footprint it won’t be surprising that some company you don’t know has everything they need to verify who you are. This is information that, if you lost your wallet you would panic over, but if some company you don’t know has it it all seems ok. Most countries in the rest of the world have extremely strong protections against that kind of data on the public record and how it can be used. So I predict that for most of the world age verification will be slow, buggy and arduous for the next year.

As for red light center, I think that is a great idea. It also got me to thinking about the “use” of kaneva and “social” worlds of that sort, and when they’re purpose specific (such as this sexy one) perhaps the market isn’t as small as I initially imagined. Neiche specific pluggable worlds such as this might take off – particularly if there’s sex or dating involved.

16) yups

17) advertisers will continue to flop and corporate sponsored arts will continue to rise. I think this is very likely – push media doesn’t work so well on the internets and particularly in VW’s. The current corporate model on the web is to leverage existing communities (such as web2.0 or interest groups) and leave customer service to their main websites – this will happen in SL too. Sponsorship of arts, letters and communities is the cheapest bang for buck in that kind of situation.

18) The emphasis on corporate sponsorship of the arts will take the stress from having to be concerned with copyright theft as events and experiences will become more important than objects and textures. Hear hear! Though corporate folk will also come with their own IP baggage when they put their cash and name to things. The trend however will be against worrying so much, and about time too – the focus on stuff in virtual worlds rather than people as the main revenue model devalues their main strength.

19) TV will feast on SL for free content – this is a given. The residents of sl will not be moraly challenged by it so much though as they’ll get their fifteen minutes, which represents social currency in world. They will still wake up in the morning feeling dirty and cheap.

20) Everyone will have a metaplace. Folk who currently base their revenue model on Your Attention(TM) will hate this as they don’t own it. Folk will monetize it effectively, but you’ve never heard of them. Some will be bought for obscenely inflated prices, and later disapoint their new owners. By that time we’ll be distracted by another shiny thing and not notice.

Well that’s my two cents