Gwyn and the Myth of the "SL Killer"

(Author's note: I started this entry nearly two weeks ago, but I got really busy, and there's been some big Virtual World announcements recently, so ... here goes take two!)

Recently there's a new buzzword on the block: "SL Killer". Holy cow. I doubt there's any better way to enunciate that Second Life is the leader in the Metaverse race! Who would have thought, a year or two ago, that when Sony announced its Playstation 3 virtual world, "Home", or a MySpace / Virtual World hybrid called "Kaneva", or even the long-awaited "Spore" were entering Beta, that they'd be labeled as second-fiddle to Second Life.

Ka-pow! Score big for Rosedale!

Virtual worlds are popping up, as are social networking sites. Many of these are passed on from the "Web 2.0" tradition - Do It Yourself, social networking, ownership of Intellectual Property, and so on. When looking at Second Life, there's an emerging question:

What Makes SL Stand Out?

My colleague (mentor, more like it) Gwyneth Llewelyn is one of the best informed Metaverse watchers. In her recent post she points out that there are "competitors" to Second Life popping up all the time. And she rightly uses quotation marks around the word, "competitors", to question the accuracy of the use of the word. Here's an insightful summary from her:

"In this age and era, [being a mainstream web community] mostly means having perhaps a few dozens of millions of users — hopefully, hundred or hundred fifty million. Without that, you’re just a grain of sand in the whole desert — a tiny blip on the radar that doesn’t register at all. Second Life, however, managed to get the media and the press to focus on “business in Second Life” since the summer of 2006 .... if you want to go mainstream, and not appeal just to a tiny majority of technological gurus, early adopters, and lonely people, you need to talk to them about business."

Whammo! Score one for Gwyn's insight! How do you make a virtual world relevant without a hundred million users? Tell yourself, "It's the economy, stupid." *smirk* Well, to disagree a bit with Gwyn, it's not that simple.

History Lesson: Webs 1.0 and 2.0

When we look at the sea of other MMOs and VWs, we see a lot of similarities. These similarities are holdovers from "Web 2.0". (Which I also put in quotation marks, because it's such an overused, vague term.) In Web 1.0, you had a web where people can connect to one another all over the globe. Successes include ebay and Amazon. In Web 2.0, add to that the power of community-building, like MySpace and flickr and YouTube.

World of Warcraft was another revolution because it grabbed the essence of community building, and drove it into a virtual world with an important distinction: avatars. When your own identity is now simulated in world, the level of interactivity reaches a whole new nature. You no longer are participating in a community - part of you is literally inside of it, in a very clear and tangible way.

Gwyn goes on to point out that other social worlds also include the virtual world aspect and the avatars. She concludes the same thing I do about Google Earth:

"The recent announcements of 'rumours' of a Google Virtual World is very likely to be exactly that: an ad-sponsored Google Earth with cute 3D avatars, which you might be able to personalise for a fee. Thus, Google will compete with IMVU, Meez, Yahoo Avatars and similar technologies, not necessarily with Second Life."

And indeed, a few of us have predicted that 2007 would be "The Year of the Avatar". People immersing in virtual worlds. But, having avatars alone isn't a silver bullet of a true "SL Killer".

So what is it about Second Life that these others don't have? It's the hybridization of social networking and user created and owned content with virtual worlds. But even more it's letting users create anything at all. Google Earth asks for things that play well with the real Earth. IMVU has you build things useful for chat. flickR wants your pictures. These are all useful things unto themselves, but they don't compare with the "Your World, your imagination" attitude of Second Life.

What WoW and There Lack

Let's go back to examining World of Warcraft. In the process of immersing the community in a virtual world, the Blizzard folks lost one of the critical aspects of Web 2.0, which was the Do-It-Yourself-ism. Sure, you can pick your class and your race and decide what dungeons to fight in, but at the end of the day, you need to join a guild and raid the same places and do very similar things, and anything you use to accomplish this has been provided by Blizzard. And it's fun, sure, but it a Metaverse it is not.

You have places like ActiveWorlds and There which bring back the ability to create what you want, but in a limited way. For example, look at how all There citizens are humans that are exactly the same height. It's a simple solution to interactive gestures - namely, if you want to shake hands or hug someone, how do you know where to position two avatars? If you know they are the same size and approximately the same shape, it's easy. But with even that small shortcut, we lose a great deal of freedom.

Breakthrough

Second Life is robust enough to corral the casual chatters, social networking folks, artists, and business developers all under one roof. Anything it can't do well, it lets existing technology do, or it is working towards that goal. Things like movie files, music streaming, flat-web page content, and so on, is either plugged into SL or in development for integration in the near future. (Voice and HTML are being tested as I write this.)

And on top of that, Linden Lab doesn't pre-screen your ideas. You don't have to submit your content for approval ahead of time; in return you're expected to abide by some standards of behavior. (Like, "Leave the swastikas off your front lawn, thanks!") This is precisely why YouTube and flickr succeed, and it's recapturing what was lost with WoW or There.

A major thing to realize is that other "SL Killers" are a step back, that is, they are specialized to a specific audience, rather than generalized to all audiences. Sony's "Home" is game-centric. Will it be fun for PS3 gamers? Sure. Will it be revolutionary? Maybe if it evolves. Kaneva forces you to be an active member of their forums or blogging community. What's wrong with casual users? There.com wants you to be "normal" humans. I guess there's no place for wheelchair-bound avatars, anthropomorphic, or abstract expressions of self in the avatar when it comes to There.com

These are also all finite worlds. WoW's Azeroth only expands when game content gets old. Kaneva is limited to apartments of users, without continuity between. PS3's Home is game waiting-space. They simply are not even on the same playing field as Second Life.

Why SL Will Fend Off Others

Gwyn simply says it's a matter of money and features. Imagine you're a competitor to Second Life. You have to ask your company and/or a venture capitol investor for a ton of cash to make a competitor. They're going to ask, "What makes yours better?" and there's not a whole lot you could say.

"Things like 'because I’m cooler than Philip, and have better developers' simply don’t stick any more; the times of the Internet Bubble, when you could 'sell ideas', are over."

You are correct! On top of that, Linden Lab has time to adjust by emulating new features that come along with "competitors".

What's funny is when I read Clay Shirky talking about how SL is a Ponzi scheme. I look at something like Kaneva, now that's a pyramid scheme! You're forced to get ratings from other users to get your virtual space, and that depends on more users coming in. Why has Shirky written about Second Life and not Kaneva? Duh, because SL is on top and Shirky is interested the readers, not the truth. *grin*

But It's not all about the Benjamins

It's not about the money alone. That gets the world's attention, sure, but if you want to look at money, look at the billions of dollars in MMORPGs being made. What really makes Second Life stand out is the content, community, and rights. The content is the ability to create whatever you want. The community allows you to share that content. The rights allows you to truly make it your intellectual property, and also - sell it, as well. That's where the money fits in, as a necessary requirement, but not a sufficient means to the Metaverse.

If there is a "SL-Killer", it's time and technology. Linden Lab's biggest competitor is that technology will change faster than Linden Lab can handle it, and that includes usage numbers and scalability.

But the network's not scalable!

The network of SL was never scalable. We've always been complaining about lag, downtime, sim-crossing issues, and so on and so forth. We have more to complain about now simply because there's more features and more users. I remember when ghosting was a huge problem, and both objects and avatars wouldn't reliably disappear when they should have until you restarted SL. As Linden Lab has stated in meetings, what they're doing with databases hasn't been done. Ever. So, if there's a problem, it's not like anyone else has a better solution right now.

Does that mean Second Life is safe from outside competitors? Yes. Does it mean it's safe? No. Remember VRML? Oh, the bitter irony. It's the early 90s and computer geeks had already established a language to describe 3-D objects on the Internet. It's called VRML.

Unfortunately, things like "broadband" and "video cards" only existed in high-end university labs, and would take another decade before it was readily available to the average computer user. Heck, it would take a few years before there was even any concept of "an average computer user" since people didn't really start all owning desktops until '96 or '97. VRML was tragically ahead of its time.

Will Second Life wind up like VRML? Well, VRML was a standard, and there was really no "Linden Lab of VRML" whose fate was tied to it, and who had a huge incentive to make it work. VRML also didn't have 4.5 million people trying it out, and tens of thousands of people spending and earning money with it.

So, in that case, maybe the survival of Second Life *is* all about the money. But there's an important distinction:

Money will allow Second Life to not be killed the technology curve.
The nature of Second Life being an online community where people can create and own their rights will prevent other platforms from killing it.

Two killers. Two reasons it won't die.