These are some of my thoughts of observations from day 2 of the Virtual Worlds Fall conference in San Jose, California.

Managing social interactions in virtual worlds

• Having government in a virtual world can actually make sense - it allows a lot of things that may be difficult in an anarchy. It just has to be done right.
• Communities kind of own themselves, but they’re also somewhat owned by the companies that support them.
• Self-governance is funny. You can’t claim that your world has self-governance unless you can prove it. Age play was banned in SL because of community demand, but Ren Reynolds claims never to have met anyone in SL who objected to it. CCP, meanwhile, has chosen to open its decision process and community standards rules to anyone who cares to investigate.
• “Owned” no longer appears on the front page of SecondLife.com. What does that mean to the SL community?
• If you want people (at least kids) committed to your site, link them to the real world.
• Community metrics: number of users, who’s friends with whom, types of interactions, who’s joining and who’s leaving. Other things like pure numbers may not be as important.

Web-based virtual worlds

• Conduit Labs, Habbo and XinJei
• XinJei is integrating with Mixi, the biggest social network in Japan
• XinJei also made MovableLife, a mobile SL client
• 70% of people will click a Play Now button, but only 30% will download
• Even with a small executable, people will download it, but not run it.
• If you’re offering a service for free, members will have really low expectations, so asking them to download something is already more effort than they expect to have to put into it.
• But developing in the browser is difficult. There’s Flash, Shockwave, Java3D, Microsoft SilverLight, Ajax and some third-party 3D plugins. If you were starting a new project, you should probably start with Flash or Ajax. Flash may be difficult to build with, but it has the widest user install base. Shockwave is barely supported any more. Java is a real option as well. SilverLight renders faster and has a more robust programming language, but again, isn’t ubiquitously installed.
• If you use Java, avoid signed applets. They pop up and require user confirmation to continue. You can lose 50% of users here. Anything that pops up and presents an obstacle really hurts user adoption.
• The rest of the conversation was about different competing technologies, add-ons and plug-ins.

Building open-source standards-based virtual worlds

• Standards is officially the most boring topic ever.
• All Sun stuff is open-source, GPL, and in Java
• Ogoglio came from a web development firm that got into more and more immersive experiences and then 3D
• Amazon is providing an open infrastructure that people can rent by the hour and by the gigabyte
• Linden Lab is moving in the open-source direction, but isn’t ready yet. Lots of users have contributed patches.
• Metaverse1 is a project to come up with a standard for a virtual world, with the catchy phrase 3D3C. The 3D part is obvious. The 3C’s are community, creation and commerce. The project creator views cashing-out as a key part of commerce.
• The moderator put forth the position that the web-based virtual worlds like Habbo are not virtual worlds, since there’s not creation. Many disagreed with his assessment.
• AOL, Microsoft Live and Friendster accounts already have OpenID equivalents. OpenID has the potential to be one of the first things selected and implemented as a standard.
• Will we end up a set of standards for interoperating, like the web? Or will we end up like the game world? The web is built on a very complicated set of standards, and it took a long time to get there. The web today is made of those standards and plug-ins for things to extend that.
• LL started with proprietary stuff, and is now moving to all communication being over http, xml and REST services, and textures being represented as jpeg images.
• Much of this conversation is the same as we went through over a decade ago with the web.
• Having standards actually forces people to compete on content and community, and removes technology from being the main selection criteria. It actually creates opportunity for more and more people to participate in virtual worlds.
• LL’s open standard that’s on the web now shows information about the architecture, physics and other things, but keeps authentication with LL.
• When you do create a standard, though, you have to implicitly let go of some control.
• The metaverse will not fulfill its potential without becoming a more standardized environment.
• The LL/IBM announcement is interesting, but people aren’t really sure what it means yet. LL is working with IBM but there’s not much to say about it yet. IBM wants to be everywhere 3D.
• LL doesn’t see Facebook and other SNS as interesting. They’re seen as mini-walled gardens.

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This entry was posted by jeremy on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 7:12 pm and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.