Virtual Worlds

Google’s launch of Lively, it’s entry to the 3D Web, ends months of speculation and at first glance is both a disappointment and a pleasure, but certainly doesn’t advance the underpinnings of the metaverse, not yet at least, and can hardly even be called a world at all.

Lively is a social networking play as compared to a virtual world play. Their goal is to try to embed 3D spaces within social networks, link it all up to youTube, and then serve ads into the space. And maybe ads in a 3D space will have more traction than the stuff you ignore when you watch a youTube video.

Combine it with context-specific search and you’re off to a branded 3D Web future - depending on the content of your room, its name, and the context of the Web site in which it’s embedded, link it to your Google profile and your search history, and Google will have a pretty good idea who you are and what ads and advertiser-supported content will interest you.

In fact, the Terms of Service lay this out quite nicely:

17.1 Some of the Services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the Services, queries made through the Services or other information.

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Last Friday, April 25th, 2008, Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics hosted a special event as part of Clever Zebra's vBusiness Expo. Rob will interview Dr. Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium, which, according to its website, is "a community of hundreds of leading universities, colleges, museums, and research centers. The NMC stimulates and furthers the exploration and use of new media and technologies for learning and creative expression," and is the largest educational project of any kind in virtual worlds.

Dr. Johnson recently testified to the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet of the US Congress. In addition to discussing his recent testimony and government policy to develop virtual worlds, the event focused on issues surrounding education activity. In particular, this event included suggestions to overcome the "game taint" of academic activity in virtual worlds and the new liabilities universities face, such as online harassment of students.

On a personal note, this will be my last official post for Metanomics. It has been an honor and a pleasure to gain exposure to the business and policy issues of Second Life and other virtual worlds. I would like to thank Rob for this great opportunity and hope to stay engaged with the Metanomics community, informally, while I gear up to begin a doctoral program in marketing at Columbia University in the Fall. I will be continuing to research on topics related to marketing, experiments and behavior in virtual worlds, and continue to welcome anyone interested in these subjects to contact me at Curric Vita in-world.

Starting next week, Bjorlyn Loon will be responsible for the weekly pre- and post- event blogs as well as the Metanomics group announcements. I am pleased that Metanomics will continue with an exceptional team of individuals who will make great contributions to the study of virtual worlds.

Farewell and best wishes,

Steve Atlas

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This Friday, April 25th, 2008, at 11:00AM-12:00PM SLT (2:00-3:00PM EST), Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics will host a special event as part of Clever Zebra's vBusiness Expo. Rob will interview Dr. Larry Johnson, CEO of New Media Consortium, who recently testified to the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet of the US Congress.

Here is some recommended reading for this week:

1. Read about NMC's three core initiatives.

2. Read about Johnson's testimony, or watch the webcast.

Materials related to this program are now compiled here.

This Monday, April 21st, 2008, at 11:00AM-12:00PM SLT (2:00-3:00PM EST), Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics will host Mitch Wagner of InformationWeek and Gartner Fellow Steve Prentice. They will discuss prospects for corporate investment in virtual worlds, the state of the competitive landscape among developers and worlds, and the future of Second Life.

Here is some recommended reading for this week:

1. Read Mitch Wagner's commentary about Qwaq, the virtual world tailored to business collaboration.

Materials related to this program are now compiled here.

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Last Monday, April 7th, 2008, Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics hosted a panel to discuss the challenges and opportunities of conducting economic experiments in virtual worlds. Our guests included:

- Tom Chesney, Lecturer in Information Systems at Nottingham University Business School
- John Duffy, Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh
- Steve Atlas, economics graduate student at Tufts University

The full transcripts are now available from the interview and backchat. Additionally, the video and audio are available, courtesy of SLCN.tv.

Materials related to this program are now compiled here.

This Monday, April 7th, 2008, at 11:00AM-12:00PM SLT (2:00-3:00PM EST), Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics will host a panel on the challenges and opportunities of conducting economic experiments in virtual worlds. Our guests include:

- Tom Chesney, Lecturer in Information Systems at Nottingham University Business School
- John Duffy, Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh

Materials related to this program are now compiled here.

On this week's Metanomics panel, Mary Gordon of Market Truths Ltd. outlined the six psychographic segments she uses to track marketing trends in virtual worlds. These include team players, connectors, chameleons, apprehensives, entrepreneurs, and competitors.

I asked Gordon to speak to the methodological issues associated with psychographic research in Virtual Worlds. Specifically, I was curious about her approach to collecting data and how she ensures that people are truthful in their responses. Eliciting truth-telling in online surveys is a common challenge of research conducted in virtual worlds, and is the subject of a current discussion on Terra Nova started by Thomas Chesney about Pittsburgh economist John Duffy's recent working paper criticizing my research. Gordon outlined some excellent practices in collecting useful and reliable data in virtual surveying:

It's certainly something we've worked on for a long time. We've been perfecting... methods for detecting liars and cheaters on Virtual Worlds for a couple of years now, so we're definitely getting better at it as we go and more confident in our ability to do that.

We have our own research panel within Second Life. And, for that we, first of all, require that people had been in Second Life for at least 30 days. Second of all, [we] require that they have a verified account. So that already reduces some of the potential--you figure, if you're going to be griefing and that kind of thing, you're probably not having a verified account so that controls some of that. We also do a lot of quality control checks on our panel to check for exactly the kinds of things that people were asking about. We don't want people that are going to be untruthful with us. It's a bit like virus detection, in the sense that I don't want to tell you too much about that because it would make it easier for people to do it in the future. But we run a whole lot of different checks on our panel, and then, for each time we collect data for a new project, we run some additional checks.

For this particular project, we'd be sampling from that panel so we don't have anybody anyway. We're doing a bunch of different samples so different people in each sample. And we're looking to see if we're getting the same results across samples because that would be another indication if people were just making stuff up. It's hard to do that in a consistent way where you'd be getting the same answer all of the time. I used to teach mar-ket research at a university so I'm really good at checking when people have made up data, and that's proved to be helpful in this regard. So we do a lot of that kind of checking to see if the data is valid. We use a lot of different samples. For the psychographic categories, there's a lot of multi varied analysis behind it. We're using fact analysis, cluster analysis and dis-criminate analysis, so we're also running different algorithms to see if we get answers different ways. In this case, we've also used samples that don't come from our research panel be-cause we wanted to just make sure, well, maybe that's true for this group of people, but it's not true for others. So we've used Second Life participants that weren't part of our panel. We've also used people just from the general population, to make sure that those categories really were robust. And, within all of that process, we do implement a lot of quality control checks so that we can identify anybody who's not truthful and get rid of them.

In particular, I am struck by Gordon's observation that the majority of inaccurate data is provided by a small portion of survey participants. However, individuals who deliberately and reliably undermine researchers for no explicit benefit, provide one of many potential examples of segments that may not cleanly fit within Gordon's paradigm. Perhaps "griefers" would make a relevant seventh psychographic category and certainly exhibit behavior that could be profiled and even targeted for marketing or policy purposes.

Nevertheless, there are certainly additional opportunities for researchers to establish general techniques to detect liars and insulate virtual research from their damaging effects. One intriguing possibility comes from the literature on truth-telling that to my knowledge has not been previously applied in virtual worlds. In particular, perhaps there is an opportunity for a direct application of MIT marketing professor Drazen Prelec's mathematical 'truth serum' designed to reduce lies in subjective judgements, or an opportunity to develop a related mechanism tailored to the griefer profile. Perhaps my next experiment will investigate this concept further.

COSMOGIRL, THERE, AND MARKETING IN VIRTUAL WORLDS
MARCH 24, 2008

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Welcome, everyone, to another session of Metanomics for another Multi World show. Some of our audience is in Second Life as usual, but our guests are here with me in There.com. So hello to the Thereians in the audience with us here. Hello to Second Lifers on CMP Islands one, two, three and four. Our regular viewers know Metanomics presents an interview or panel discussion on business and policy issues in Virtual Worlds every Monday at 11:00 A.M. Pacific time. And this is a rather unusual Multi World edition, which is a little harder to pull off than usual. So kudos to our team at Second Life Cable Network, to CMP and to There, all of us working together to make this happen.

Materials related to this program are now compiled here.

This Monday, March 24th, 2008, at 11:00AM-12:00PM SLT (2:00-3:00PM EST), Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics will broadcast from There.com to discuss CosmoGIRL. We will be joined by:

- Morgan Brooks, Associate Promotion Manager, CosmoGirl! (CG_Host_Morgan)
- Michael Wilson, CEO, There.com
- Mary Ellen Gordon, Managing Director of Market Truths Ltd.

Materials related to this program are now compiled here.

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Last Monday, March 3rd, 2008, Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics hosted David Levine, 23-year veteran of IBM Research.

Broadcasting live on SLCN.tv from CMP Amphitheatre at CMP Isle 1, this event covered the business implications of:

- three-dimensional visualization
- Second Life's Architecture Working Group (AWG)
- the OpenSim efforts to reverse-engineer private servers to work with the open-sourced Second Life viewer;
- Virtual World business models of Linden Lab & There

Event highlights after the jump.

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Last Monday, February 25th, 2008, Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics hosted Michael Wilson, CEO of There.com.

Broadcasting live on SLCN.tv from There.com, this event discussed There.com's "Four Rivers of Revenue" for virtual worlds, the strategic vision of There.com and the future of the Metaverse.

The video and backchat from this event are now available. The transcript and event highlights will be available soon.

Materials related to this program are now compiled here.

Download the video (Quicktime)
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Read the interview transcript
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Metaversed video archive at SLCN
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Last Monday, February 18th, 2008, Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics convened a panel to discuss "Real World Press in Virtual Worlds. Our Guests included:

- Eric Krangel of Reuters Press
- John Jainschigg of CMP Metaverse
- Rhonda Lowry of Turner Broadcasting
- Prokofy Neva of SecondThoughts.

Broadcasting live on SLCN.tv from CMP Amphitheatre, this event discussed:

- How does a presence in Second Life fit into the corporate strategies of real world profit seeking media giants?
- What is the impact of real world media on the Second Life community?

This post also contains some highlights of the event, after the jump.

Materials related to this program are now compiled here.

This Monday, February 25th, 2008, at 11:00AM-12:00PM SLT (2:00-3:00PM EST), Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics will host Michael Wilson, CEO of There.com.

This interview will cover the "Four Rivers of Revenue" for virtual worlds, the strategic vision of There.com and the future of the Metaverse.

Please follow these links for some background reading related to Monday's event:

- Read about the future of platforms as envisioned by Wilson and other virtual world heavyweights at last year's Virtual Worlds Expo

Materials related to this program are now compiled here.

This Monday, February 18th, 2008, at 11:00AM-12:00PM SLT (2:00-3:00PM EST) Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics will host members of the press to discuss the topic, "Real World Press in Virtual Worlds."

Our guests will include:

Materials related to this program are now compiled here.

Download the video (Quicktime)
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Read the interview transcript (doc)
Metaversed video archive at SLCN
Subscribe to the Metanomics '08 feed

Last Monday, February 11th, 2008, Metanomics held a multi-world broadcast from the Emory University Conference, "Virtual Worlds and New Realities in Commerce, Politics and Society." Streaming live simultaneously from Emory University and Second Life, our cross-world panel included:

From the Emory conference,
- Robert Bloomfield, Cornell University (Host/Moderator)
- Benn Konsynski, Emory University
- Chris Klaus, Founder and CEO, Kaneva

From Second Life,
- John Zdanowski, CFO, Linden Lab (aka Zee Linden)

This esteemed panel discussed this week's topic, "Possible Futures of Virtual Worlds and Society".

For some mind-expanding pictures of the world-within-world-within-world broadcast, you can see pictures taken by:
- JenzZa Misfit
- JimmyJet

This post also contains some highlights of the event, after the jump.