Category Archive

If you’re at Web 2.0 Expo, come to my talk tomorrow, Wednesday from 3:20 - 4:10 pm in room 2009, about “the Future of Online Gaming & Virtual Worlds.”   I’ve put together a wonderful group of panelists that includes:

• Gene Yoon, VP Business Affairs for LindenLab / SecondLife
• Craig Sherman, CEO of Gaia Online
• Lane Merrifield, CEO of Club Penguin
• Raph Koster, President of Areae
• Joi Ito, Chairman of Creative Commons, Board member of Mozilla, and my World of Warcraft guild leader

I’m psyched because Gaia Online and Club Penguin are both talking publicly for the first time ever about their businesses.  These are two of the most exciting web companies you’ve probably never heard of, unless you have kids between the ages of 6-15.  

I’m taking question suggestions!  Post your comments.

We’ll be talking about why “online gaming and virtual worlds” is incredibly important to the future of the Web as a whole.  And maybe delving into SecondLife’s furry monetization strategy.

Folks like Wagner James Au and Mitch Wagner of InformationWeek have already blogged about the panel, but I wanted to share my presentation with the folks that couldn’t make it.  This is my take only.  The other panelists - Wagner James Au, Robert Scoble, and Robin Hunicke all had great things to say.  By the way, Robin is brilliant.  She’s the lead designer for the forthcoming MySims on the Nintendo Wii and a PhD candidate in CS/AI at Northwestern.  As she spoke, I thought ”Sheesh, it’s going to be hard to follow her.”

The question I was trying to answer was, “Is the next generation of the consumer web 3D?”  I think the answer is not necessarily.  

1. The reason why we’re asking this question is because there’s a bubble forming in the virtual world space right now.  

That’s a pretty incendiary statement. What do I mean by it?  What I see on the horizon are dozens and dozens of new virtual world platforms and titles hitting the market - far more than the public will want to consume.   By ‘title,’ I mean a self contained, branded version of a virtual world much like “Virtual Laguna Beach.”  All the big media and consumer goods companies are looking at what’s happening with online community sites like MySpace and Facebook and want in on this action desperately.  

However, I think that all of the media hype around Second Life is misleading the public about what the next generation consumer Internet might look like.   That isn’t to say that Second Life doesn’t have tremendous merit in moving the dialogue forward about what collaborative work and play spaces feel like.  What I mean is that there are now quite a few companies who equate “future of online communities” with “3D graphical world.”  The mad rush by these big brands to create empty showrooms in SecondLife is proof of this.   Just like in the dot-Bust days, there will be lots of shoddy substandard products brought to market in the mad frenzy to create a ‘presence.’ 

But the good news is that in this crazy landgrab, there will be a couple of winners that shine through.   There is considerable appetite for online play spaces right now - you can see the proof of this in the many bootstrapped and under the radar services that are getting a lot of traction. 

2.  What does the next generation consumer Internet look like?

What I’m interested in above all else is the nature and evolution of people and our constructs [culture, economic and belief systems.]  As I’ve said before, I think the real story behind the consumer web today is what’s going on cognitively - how our relationship with the Internet is changing. 

Here’s how I see the evolutionary arc of the online user experience:

Web 1.0: Information Sharing
Web 2.0: Interaction
Web 3.0: Immersion

By immersion, I mean that people will demand experiences that are more emotional, engaging and genuine.  3D graphics are one way to create immersiveness, but not the only tool we have in our toolkit.

Let’s look at how the ways people have expressed themselves online have changed over time:

Pre-Web: Text based worlds
(I am looking at a character named Ulion and the text he has used to describe himself)

Web 1.0: Geocities

Web 2.0: MySpace, currently the world’s largest massively multiplayer online game

Then, there are a few sites that reveal glimpses of what the future might look like.

Web 2.1: Gaia Online
(Gaia started as a bulletin board system that has slowly layered in a 2D virtual world graphical metaphor over time. What you’re looking at is one user’s profile.)

Web 2.1: Yelp

Web 2.1: Flixster

3. What are the implications?

We are moving from web pages to web places.  More and more game-like features will find their way into everyday web design - you see this already being implemented successfully on sites like Yelp and Flixster.  People will seek out experiences, rather than just content.  3D is just one tool out of the many we have available to create immersive, engaging experiences.  3D should be used tactically - it makes sense for some audiences and for some applications.  There are many ways to think about presence and dimensionality online.  3D graphics facilitate spatial/physical awareness. But we should also be thinking about 3 dimensional social presence and shared/collaborative presence.  Luckily, there are a couple of good examples in this space already.

This post will be continued…

In a previous post, I talked about how I respected Second Life but felt that it was probably unsustainable, primarily due to the fact that the system isn’t more open. Virtual worlds and social networks generally thrive with permeable boundaries, not rigid ones.  Well a few months later, Linden Lab has announced that it is open sourcing the Second Life client under the GNU GPL license.

While open sourcing the client doesn’t necessarily result in an open platform or openness of user experience, it does at least allow for an environment in which 3rd party designers and developers can create the tools that might bring about a more open user experience.   Openness is a design philosophy, whereas open source is a licensing choice. 

So while Second Life still has a ways to go on the openness front, IMO, it is a pretty bold first step and opens the system to a lot of exciting new prospects.   I join Raph Koster amongst many others in congratulating them for making this step.

Of course, Second Life isn’t the first virtual world to become open source.  The history of the virtual world is intricately linked to open source back to the early MUD/MOO days.  Various projects like World Forge and the more recent Open Croquet have already been down this path, though neither of these projects has had the number of ‘residents’ nor the vibrant economy of Second Life.

One of the primary benefits of open source is that it can make the platform much more accessible to many new audiences - e.g. open source creates economies of scale around innovation and distribution. This is at the heart of the long tail argument: open source allows each participant in the ecosystem to do their own marginal benefit/marginal cost calculation to determine whether or not it’s worthwhile to modify the code for their own (possibly narrow) needs.  In contrast, in a proprietary system, the code maintainer does one single marginal cost calculation that generalizes the needs of many. 

In the case of Second Life, the viewer application was already available for all the major OSes, including Mac OS X, Linux, & Windows, so basic OS platform support isn’t much of an issue, but the open sourcing will still likely result in many beneficial developments, including:

• Reducing the engineering/QA costs at Linden Lab. As one of the better implementations of a Snow Crash like Metaverse, Second Life has attracted more creator personality types than traditional online games or communities. libsecondlife, a library/SDK that implements a subset of the Second Life network protocol, is a pretty good indication of how motivated these hacker/coder types will be to extend the utility of the Second Life client beyond what it can currently do. A fully open sourced client extends the possibilities both by being a more powerful framework into which new functionality can be added and simply because it is a fully official project, supported directly by Linden Lab.
• Mashup style applications, widgets for MySpace.  libsecondlife was somewhat limited, in that it was built on a partial reverse engineering of the SL protocol,  whereas the full viewer release reveals the complete details of the protocol. I expect to see things like web page to Second Life widgets allowing Second Life users to check their in-world messages or chat with people who are in-world without actually loading the full viewer application locally.  I also expect to see scaled down Second Life clients that can run on cell phones or other small devices, giving the user a simplified 2D experience of the Second Life world as an alternative for when they can’t run the full desktop client. I don’t expect these clients to support the full immersive Second Life environment like the official desktop client, but lightweight in-browser access would be a net positive for a lot of Second Life members.
• Improved graphics. For all the network engineering marvels Second Life possesses, its graphical engine is decidedly old school by today’s standards. There are a lot of ways in which it could be improved while still displaying the same content. I expect some bored graphics developers to take the core client and move it over to a more shader-friendly rendering model, perhaps adding in some clever automatic up-ressing of texture and 3D model content in the process, a la Tenebrae Quake.
• Better support for third-party building tools. With the full client open sourced, I’d be surprised if the 3D model builders who live, eat and breath Maya or 3D Studio Max or Blender don’t build tools to allow them to more directly interface their 3D modelling tool of choice into the Second Life world viewer.
• Accessibility by new audiences. For what I assume are the purposes of ease of cross-platform development, Second Life uses a custom UI widget system. Between this and the inherent blind-accessibility problem of untagged 3D data, Second Life just hasn’t been very accessible to the disabled. While there is no guarantee that this an itch some third-party developers will want to scratch, it would be a really nice benefit if it did come to pass. A virtual world like Second Life is exactly the sort of thing that could be liberating for a lot of disabled folks, yet the current system doesn’t cater to them at all. Hopefully motivated open source developers will fill the gap here.

The open sourcing of the Second Life viewer is a big leap forward and as with any big change, there will be some short term growing pains and fears. Wagner James Au highlights three such issues in a recent post on GigaGamez. While his concerns are valid, I don’t think any of the three issues he cites will be long term problems for an open source Second Life. His three major points include:

• Revenge of CopyBot - The whole CopyBot issue seems to have been overblown in retrospect. As I mentioned in a previous blog post, CopyBot itself was no great revelation for the technically savvy. Even before it existed, there were plenty of OpenGL and DirectX mesh capture utilities for graphical engine debugging that could have been used in secret for the same purpose. Ultimately, there is nothing Linden Lab can do technically to stop geometry/texture capture. This is something that has to be handled as a social/terms of service violation, which is what they have been doing since the original rise of CopyBot.
• Dying Netscape’s Noble Death? - I’m not sure the Netscape analogy is a good one at all, considering that for now Linden still controls the server and thus the network protocols that are the “keys to the kingdom”. But even if the Netscape analogy holds, Wagner notes that Netscape currently has less than 1% of the current web browser market, which is somewhat misleading as it ignores the pedigree and/or the success of Firefox.
• Building Babel? - Again, as long as Linden controls the servers and thus the network protocols, I don’t think any Babel will result. It will be extremely interesting to see how Linden Lab goes about open sourcing the server side of Second Life (which they have said they will do) without some sort of world splitting and some amount of Babel as envisioned by James, but for just this client release, I don’t really see that happening.

Of course, none of this is exactly world changing, and it still remains to be seen how Linden Lab handles the open sourcing of the server, which is potentially a much bigger deal.  But this is a great first step and I’m glad to see them moving along this path, both as someone who uses Second Life and as someone who is passionate about virtual worlds in general.

 UPDATE:
Other good posts from Ethan Zuckerman (”The core objection I raised…a few weeks back is the fact that Second Life, at present, is a monopoly.”) and Stephen O’Grady (”Linden’s probably only a few years away from an Innovator’s Dilemma in terms of combatting open alternatives”) and Cory Doctorow (”an enormous stride towards turning Second Life residents into real citizens instead of mere customers. “)

Second Life is interesting to me - I truly respect the service, but I don’t love it.  That is, I have a lot of intellectual respect for the way they’ve run their business - they’ve been bold, innovative, and relentlessly experimental.  But the service doesn’t grab me emotionally.   I also think that their high technical barriers to participation and the fact that SL is a closed standards system ultimately deters them from reaching mass market adoption.  Yes, they get a lot of publicity and their logins are growing at a fast clip - but I suspect there is a significant amount of churn. I spend a lot of time in the area of virtual worlds - because I think we’re just at the tip of the iceberg here.   

One day, there will be an open standards based platform that makes virtual asset/world creation as easy as choosing templates and widgets for your MySpace page.  In fact, today’s social networking services like MySpace and Flickr already incorporate some smart game design principles, such as levelling up, collecting virtual objects, and homesteading in the form of customization. I expect that virtual items will one day become a far more legitimate asset class and that there will be much improved liquidity for these assets in the future.  It sounds absurd, but there are some basic economic reasons why this concept of real money trade (RMT) makes sense, despite all of the negativity that RMT receives from the core gaming community:
1) Virtual goods can confer real economic utility,
2) It can be much cheaper to buy virtual goods than procuring them via more traditional methods - such as actually spending the requisite time necessary in-game or in-world,
3) Virtual goods can generate attractive investment returns.The folks who are already making their living in Second Life know this and they are the pioneers for what is to come. What the Electric Sheep Company and Edelman PR is doing with this business plan competition is exciting and I’m happy to be a small part of it.   For the record, CRV is not investing in any of these virtual Second Life businesses - I’m merely a judge.    I’m interested to see how these real entrepreneurs adapt to problems that aren’t idiosyncratic to virtual worlds (the stability of the currency) and ones that are idiosyncratic (how the recent CopyBot problem may mean that only services centric businesses can thrive in Second Life.)   Also for the record, I don’t believe that the current patterns of real estate values in virtual worlds will hold - for reasons that I’ll get into in a later post.

The Second Life business plan contest launch event was fun.  Here’s a snapshot from the event - we panelists are facing the audience: 

We were asked, “What are you looking for in a Second Life business plan?”

My answer is that I’m looking for the same things that matter in every other type of business.  None of this is novel - far wiser and more articulate folks have made the same points in the past. 

1. The team, and its authenticity and empathy for the user experience.  What I mean by this is that I’m looking for founders who come from the community that they aim to serve.  Do they speak the language of their customers? Do they empathize with their customers’ pain?  Do they feel passion for their users? Mitch Ratcliffe wrote in a great blog post today, “Social networks need some soul, not just a business school pedigree.”  For example, I would be a horrible Second Life entrepreneur.  I don’t use Second Life nearly enough to understand the relationship dynamics between its citizens and its service.  My starting a business in Second Life would be presumptuous and arrogant, because I’d be coming in as an outsider. 

That old Hairclub for Men line of “I’m not just the President, I’m a customer!” is comical but rings true.  We are looking for founders who deeply understand the customer problems they are trying to solve.  Don’t despair - even if you’ve never experienced hair loss, you could still build a believable Hairclub for Men business.  Do first hand research.  Go into the field.  Live amongst your subjects.  Take notes. Observe.  Listen.  If you observe and listen well, you’ll learn the local language and customs, internalize your tribe’s aspirations and fears, and your customers will soon begin to accept you as one of their own.

2. Unfair advantage.  This is the elusive secret sauce that sets you apart from all of your competition.  What about your business and your approach can’t be done by anybody else? Focus on that, and outsource/open source the rest.   That din you hear at your door? That’s [Google|guy in a garage] waiting to crush you.  Your unfair advantage is what keeps them at bay.  Unfair advantage can manifest itself as proprietary and differentiated technology, a superior business model, an incredible team iterating on past success solving similar customer pain, or a network of relationships that drives down customer acquisition costs. 

Furthermore, you need to demonstrate that this unfair advantage is sustainable.  Sustainable, unfair advantage is directly correlated to your ability to consistently receive better economic returns than your competitors.  Software as a service has a sustainable advantage over traditionally delivered enterprise software because it’s simply a far more efficient alignment of capital allocation and customer needs.  That being said, SaaS by itself is no longer a sustainable competitive advantage of its own - not in a market where every emerging software company employs a service strategy.  [I've written about the economic advantages of SaaS and open source on another blog.]

 3. Attractive market.  Let’s imagine that I’m the most cynical financier possible and the one and only thing that matters to me is delivering economic returns to my investors.  I’d be looking for businesses that served the entire world population and whose customers were completely price insensitive.   [Oil.] [Drinking water, in unregulated markets.]  Businesses with high customer switching costs.  [Cigarettes.] An attractive market doesn’t necessarily have to be sizeable - though size and [willingness to pay | average revenue per user] are on the same axis.  However, I’m happy to say I’m not a completely cynical financier.  Ideally, I’d love to back businesses that deliver sound economic returns and also do good for society.  [eBay. Google, maybe.]

That all being said, there are some tangible differences between building a Second Life startup and building a more traditional startup.  Though it may seem like the traditional startup business resembles the Wild West, the Second Life frontier is far hairier.  The risks inherent in Second Life startups reminds me a bit of investing in China - there’s a mostly benign dictator (Linden Labs, in this case) who wields enormous regulatory power over the landscape.   Audience members at our session had a lot of questions about currency and economic stability in Second Life.  Just as we trust the Federal Reserve of the United States to keep our dollar stable and valuable, so too must entrepreneurs have faith in Linden Labs to maintain the stability of the Second Life economy.   The Linden dollar has only as much value as you have faith in Linden Labs.

[sidebar:
friend (12:12:09 AM): What are you up to?
me (12:12:18 AM): I'm writing a blog post about unfair advantage and how it's critical to startups
friend (12:12:29 AM): What's your unfair advantage in writing about it?
....
me (12:15:23 AM): my sparkling personality?
]

So…very timely to our launch tomorrow of the Second Life Business Plan contest is the Copybot scandal that’s threatening to undermine the entire SL virtual economy.   

CopyBot captures the data being streamed to a local SL client and allows the user to clone that data in a way that creates an identical copy. Furthermore, this copy is not linked to the original in any meaningful way on the server-side and thus can’t be identified as a direct copy.  Needless to say, this disrupts SL’s entire economy because it’s now easy to create millions of perfect knock-offs of the virtual Hermes boots it took me 15 craftsmen and 2 months to painstakingly build. 

(Not Hermes Boots by Sol Columbia available for sale at the SL Boutique)

My friend Raph Koster wrote an awesome post yesterday analogizing the situation to the heated debates about DRM in the music and video markets: DRM is good when it works to protect your economic interests, evil when it prevents us from enjoying the data we want.  Raph says, “CopyBot is a mirror, and what we see reflected in it is the unsavory fact that we all want DRM, if it favors us.” 

A lot of controversy has erupted within the SL community over what to do about this issue, with many content creators vocally attacking SL’s developer, Linden Lab, for allowing the situation to occur.  Interestingly, CopyBot grew out of an open source library that was developed by third-party OSS developers but is unofficially endorsed and supported by Linden Labs.  Once CopyBot fell into the hands of end users for the purposes what amounts to basically SL piracy, the libsecondlife developers removed the CopyBot source code from their servers at the request of Linden Labs.  But of course, once something like this has been unleashed, it is essentially impossible to contain it.  In fact the press surrounding the scandal only amplifies the tool’s popularity amongst the folks who are most likely to abuse it.

 

The interesting question that arises is how do you close Pandora’s box?  What can Linden Labs do now?

The simple answer in most cases is that you can’t close Pandora’s box, at least not completely.  Linden Labs has begun to take a hardline stance on this issue by threatening people caught using the CopyBot with world banning, based on Terms of Services violations.  I suspect they will also go down the obfuscation road in future patches of the SL software.

Data and code obfuscation is something that software developers have been dealing with for a while now.  As computer languages (such as Java and C#) emerged with rich metadata that allowed developers to use programming concepts such as reflection, the amount of descriptive data in the executable that runs the program has grown to the point where it is often trivial for a decompiler to reverse engineer the program back into usable source code.

There is no real bullet-proof way to avoid this situation without losing all the benefits that the meta-data provides and so the primary way of dealing with the issue is to obfuscate the code before shipping it out to users.  Basically, this involves running an executable which reads your executable, and using many of the same meta-data constructs that allow for de-compilation, it does a lot of renaming of identifiers, so that every method or public variable in your program will be named a, aa, aaa, aaaa, etc. instead of the real names that are in the original source code.  The end result is an executable that can still be decompiled, but when decompiled is so confusing to a human reader that it is pretty much useless.

This exact type of obfuscation isn’t directly applicable to 3D data as used in Second Life but I can easily see Linden Labs employing the same basic strategy of complicating the 3D mesh format they used for the sake of being harder to reverse engineer.  This doesn’t stop things like CopyBot from being written (in fact, there are already graphical capture software programs that work at the OpenGL or DirectX driver layer that could have done what CopyBot is doing a long time ago) but it does make them a lot more difficult.  And in the end pretty much the best you can hope for when it comes to digital data duplication is to make it so difficult to do that it is just much easier for the user to acquire it legally than it is to steal a copy.  Which gets us back to the DRM debate. 

And with regards to the Second Life business plan contest - I’m interested to see whether or not it dampens the entrepreneurial spirit within SL or whether new folks will see all of the fear and concern as an opportunity from which to build new businesses.

I am excited that my friend Giff Constable, of the Electric Sheep Company, invited me to participate in a business plan contest that focuses on fostering entrepreneurship within Second Life.  This event is being jointly produced by the Electric Sheep Company and Edelman, the PR firm. 

 I invite you to join us this Friday, November 17th at 1:00 PM Second Life time (Pacific Time,) as we kick off the event with a live panel.  Speakers will be me, Rick Murray (head of Edelman’s me2revolution practice,) and Sibley Verbeck, CEO of the Electric Sheep Company.

More details about the event and the business plan contest can be found here.