Note to Lindens and marketing gurus: MAKE THE INWORLD GROUPS AVAILABLE ANY TIME OUTSIDE OF SL AND ACCESSIBLE BY THOSE BOTH INWORLD AND OUTWORLD.
Here's why...but...
Is the coast clear yet? I think the buzz around the Harvard guy's article has died down now so that I can safely blog about it. You see, he contacted me by email right at publication and sent me the link, urging me fearlessly to do my worst (he apparently had picked up on the fact that I'm a sharp critic).
Knowing how these things worked, he figured any review, even a bad review, is part of the buzz you need to get established with an idea. Controversies bring more hits. When I had this Metaverse Grudge Match with Raph Koster, which seemed to spring out of nowhere, he said the next time he gathered his statistics that article was the one with the most hits, and that drove up his overall
traffic, and that drove up his kachinging ads on that web page. "More Prokofy means more readers," he said. Really, I should be paid for this...and of course that's exactly what some would like to do, buy me, pay for me, and get paid themselves.
The Harvard guy, of course, was primarily interested in the intellectual discourse around his insights...um, I think. After all, if I had slammed it and started an uproar about it, that would have driven traffic to his site, that would have only given him traffic with no payouts, since the article was still for free. It was linked to the Lindens front page (and still is); Clickable Culture, Hammie, they all blogged it up and RL media also began commenting everywhere. So now, he can't expect to get any advantage from my blogging while cleverly waiting for the dust to have settled because now, all that can happen is that people will click on this link and learn they have to pay $16.25 just for the article!
Oh, wait! Curses, foiled again! Grrr. Of course a certain portion of my readers *will* now pay that ridiculous price for one Harvard-baked article, especially if they are in some ad agency's department or some big university with all kinds of slush funds for "server storage" which they use for "an island in Second Life". Yeesh. I am such a tard.
OK. So he got all the media/blog hits he wanted, SL and RL, and got the ultimate pay-off from Raph Koster, who called his article "exhaustively researched".
I gave it a zing then, saying there was nothing "well-researched" about merely quoting Philip Linden's canned speech, which he gave in March to Google, and has recycled about a dozen times all over the RL circuit, finally to give it one more tired flog to the netizens of Second Life in a town hall meeting, before giving it a final tired-horse beating for Podcast where it can be immortalized. In this flog, Philip tells us how people have made 10 million objects. Of course, we don't know if they made 10 million *good* objects. I'm not sure if this means every single prim cube, named "object," or whether only finished and named objects were included in Philip's typical gaga server statistics but we've all absorbed the lesson now: 25 percent of the people make stuff for the other 75 percent (and their own cohort) and they sell it for a gadzillion amount of real life dollars.
So Raph then countered that he meant the entire article, not the canned Linden stuff, was well-researched, which one can concede...except it was written in the usual button-downed, obvious, but let's-make-it-seem-more-scholarly style that you come to expect from a publication like that.
I mean, what is Harvard? Harvard is the grandest commodity of the American experiment. If you have "Harvard," you have everything -- influence, money, even looks (they can be backdated to fit the first 2 things). "Harvard" still means, despite everything surrounding the stories of scandal periodically surrounding it, like Jeffrey Sachs (give my Harvard institution a grant, you actually buy me, too, I then move to the other venue you'd rather have your grant at after a high-profile investment scandal in Russia); Cornell West (I can run political movements of various sorts, contribute to a rap CD, and just publish an article or book very rarely and still keep my credentials); or Lawrence Summers (I can say that women aren't really wired to be scientists and still be president...for awhile anyway). But I'm not really here to blog about real life, though Paul Hemp turning his attention to SL is like "Harvard Boys Do Russia".
The Harvard imprimature can affect everything. I've even started calling the "backslash" that you are now absolutely supposed to use in every higher-toned SL venue to silence the idiotic din of the Linden-induced avatar drone typing the "Harvard backslash" since Berkman Island is really assiduous about policing it during meetings. (And live music venues are too).
I first began debating about the Paul Hemp's concept on Clickable Culture. Tony was skeptical that we could posit entities known as "avatars" that had any sort of mind/wallet of their own. Obviously, they require human agency.
I posited that no, the avatar, being a window into the soul, and an ensouled body of its own, has a separate life than the human typist. He might at times do things for which the typist will be sorry he has to pay, later.
The effect is something like that old Guys and Dolls song:
What's playing at the Roxy?
I'll tell you what's playing at the Roxy.
A picture about a Minnesota man falls in love with a Mississippi girl
That he sacrifices everything and moves all the way to Biloxi.
That's what's playing at the Roxy.
What's in the daily news?
I'll tell you what's in the daily news.
Story about a man bought his wife a small ruby
With what otherwise would have been his union dues.
That's what's in the daily news.
What's happening all over?
I'll tell you what's happening all over.
Guy sitting home by a television set
That used to be something of a rover.
That's what's happening all over.
Love is the thing that has nipped them.
And it looks like Nathan's just another victim.
NICELY (spoken) Yes, sir!
When you see a guy reach for stars in the sky
You can bet that he's doing it for some doll.
When you spot a John waiting out in the rain
Chances are he's insane as only a John can be for a Jane.
When you meet a gent paying all kinds of rent
For a flat that could flatten the Taj Mahal.
Call it sad, call it funny.
But it's better than even money
That the guy's only doing it for some doll.
When you see a Joe saving have of his dough
You can bet there'll be mink in it for some doll.
When a bum buys wine like a bum can't afford
It's a cinch that the bum is under the thumb of some little broad.
When you meet a mug lately out of the jug
And he's still lifting platinum folderol
Call it hell, call it heaven
But it's probable twelve to seven
That the guy's only doing it for some doll.
(interlude)
When you see a sport and his cash has run short
Make a bet that he's banking it with some doll.
When a guy wears tails with the front gleaming white
Who the hell do you think he's tickling pink on Saturday night?
When a lazy slob takes a goody steady job,
And he smells from vitalis and barbasol.
Call it dumb, call it clever
Ah, but you can get odds forever
That the guy's only doing it for some doll
Some doll, some doll
The guy's only doing it for some doll!
The principle works the same in Second Life. The avatars' pocketbook has $1000 in it which seems like a LOT and makes him feel rich; in fact it's only $3.00 US. And the fact that it is game money, and also seemingly very little needs to be done to bring in "thousands" (sell your first land, sell an item you made, win at a casino, turn a trick), then you rapidly think that spending the thousands isn't such a big deal, either. Yumi didn't believe me when I said some people could spend $1000 US on their avatars in a year. I think she just hasn't seen some of my tenants and all their gear. Even the conservative Linden estimate that people spend $1500 Lindens in each 4-hour log-in will give you $540 US a year -- and given the $5 MILLION US that is actually generated on this game *each month* (look at the running figures on the front page) people spend a lot more. (BTW, I don't believe those numbers, because I don't know whether they double count Lindex transactions, or whether they include or don't include tier or island sales, who the hell knows, they aren't talking. Back when they had it, I used to notice that the total daily for "objects sold in world" running as "last 10 things sold inworld" never remotely reached the "total US dollars spent today").
So whoever advertises and appeals to the avatar's wants and needs has us by our little pixelated balls. Many people don't seem to mind this. Others do, depending on their national, religious, and cultural backgrounds. The "don't need land to have fun" crowd are obviously the sort that don't understand the marketing and the spending that is going on here.
When I was permabanned a year ago, it was for taking on the top businesses of SL. Back then, I thought the zealous and selective -- and injust -- prosecution of me was related to the fragile egos of both Lindens, residents, and Lindesidents involved (residents-turned-Lindens). They were all terribly nervous about being noticed by the outside world from not among their fiercely loyal and tribal ranks, and terribly scared about RL big business coming in and blowing them away. Some of them still are, of course, but I've come to see that's not what it is about, entirely.
It's more about power just for its own sake, and unwillingness to share. Because in fact these "big businesses" of SL weren't blown away by the RL big businesses coming in. Nothing of the sort. At least, not most of them (there was of course fierce squabbling among some of them as they fought amongst each other for these leads). In fact, most of the people I criticized have only been able to flourish by hiring themselves out as Metaverse Consultants to big business and serving as sherpas guiding these big companies through the jungles and weeds of SL. A few of them don't seem to be successfully converting themselves in that way, like Cristiano Midnight, though he may be trying to fashion another career appearing as a whiny commentator on Second Cast and things like Harvard panels to position himself for the time when he can either charge for the snapshot baroning he does or sell the entire thing to some rich third-party entity, sort of the way FlipperPA sold SLBoutique.com to the Electric Sheep (while Cristiano's customers don't pay money, they pay in emotions, since pictures of all their special SL moments are hugely valuable to people, as some of the many photography studios in SL have learned catering to the desire of people to have really kick-ass SL screenshots on the walls of their McMansions.)
And of course, there's the main piece of all this which was related to my forums ban, and other actions taken against me (including the usual Linden social-engineering, which is the Shamu method of ignoring behaviour/statements they don't like to try to induce "positively-reinforced" behaviour that is positive by their lights.)
And that's the data scraping. Paul didn't fully grapple with this, but before I bore everyone with trying to struggle through my thinking on this, let me point to Collision Detection and someone else who has already blogged about this privacy/data issue far better than I can, while I was waiting until the buzz died down so I could think about this in peace.
I'm fairly certain that the Collision Detection people do not wear tin hats. "In a virtual world, everything an avatar does -- literally everything -- is loggable and monitorable," they write. Then quote Harvard:
.. the amount of marketing and purchasing data that could be mined is
staggering. An avatar's digital nature means that every one of its
moves -- for example, perusing products in a store and discussing them
with a friend -- can be tracked and logged in a database. This
behavioral information, organized by individual avatar, aside from
being priceless to marketers in the long term, could be processed
immediately. An avatar clerk might appear from behind the counter and
offer to answer an avatar customer's question -- questions the clerk
would already know because they would have been gathered and recorded
in the database.
Well, as I pointed out a year ago, and humdog pointed out even 3 years ago, it goes much further than that.
It's not only that the data scrapers can grab what Dow Jones on the Herald has called the "inventory of inventiveness, the projection of another, desire self" and the stuff of dreams. People's deepest wants. Some warehouse clerk dressed up as a girl buying Aimee's lacy underthings. Some stay-at-home mother buying a trollop's outfit or DJ equipment for a club. That's all been rehearsed.
More to the point, the relationships between people can also be charted, and I don't think the Harvard article or other far more superficial news accounts or magazine essays about virtual marketing have grasped this quite yet. Alts can be outed. People who aggregate can be tracked. Places they go can be tracked. And by following groups, even more important than individual avatars, especially if they form an Advertar or a Harvitar and start tracking the group IMs, are where the money is. Where the future is not only of marketing, but Life Itself. "Life itself will show us," as Mikhail Sergeyeich used to say.
The group IMs formed by making formal groups for $100 in Second Life, or forming a nonce "calling card" group out of all, or some of, your calling cards (you can keep batches of them in differently-named folders) are what sells stuff in SL: land, mall space, new products, gadgets, clothing, ideas like "we need p2p" or policies like "we hate these red ban lines".
Groups are where people talk all at once, and all the time. Many people are even asking for group chat to be muted so they can cut the droning, but nobody cuts it by *leaving* the group because they want to know what is going on. Whoever figures out a way through a script or something to save more of the group chat (now it has to be done through "select" and "cut and paste" more awkwardly, and often can't fit on a notecard and you have to go out of the game) will make a fortune -- people would love to be able to have all their groups save their chat, possibly with key words, when they are offline or busy, but read it later, like they do with their saving of TV programs so they can watch them later without commercials.
The Guardian columnist Alex Krotoski who is studying the social networks in Second Life also has only part of the story. She may track this or that person's calling cards with "friendship" status, as the one formal indicator she has of their connection, and ask them a static list of questions (the first edition of the questionnaire had non-SL related questions such as attitudes about spreading AIDS). But calling cards don't mean an awful lot; groups mean more. For now, cards confer the ability to map people, a function mainly used by jealous lovers and tenants worried their landlords won't get to all their requests in IMs. Real friends don't need to be mapped. You talk to them mainly in IMs, in fact. Some, you might only talk to in a group IM when you see them in a group. There are friendship cards you'd never cut just because of their status, even though you never use them to click and send inventory, etc.
Much more communication occurs in groups. I'm not sure I can claim that more of it occurs in group IMs or room chat of gathered avatars than it does in private IMs, but it's a close second anyway.
The reason SL is so sluggish is that people overuse the search functions. Rather than opening up their handy calling card folder, sorting alphabetically, finding their friend, and clicking, or going to the left-hand-lower-corner and clicking around to get the friends list and whose online up, people type their friend's name in to the people data base and see if they are online, or they get on a group -- and one of the reasons the Lindens were reluctant to make people have the option for more groups is that groups really make huge stresses on the data bases. Like the map, calling cards already in your inventory aren't really used. The one thing really used by everybody all the time always and overused is the search database. That's why it keeps breaking. People use it to type sim names into the list and teleport (they can't read maps, they went to American high schools). The use it to find even friends whose cards they have. They use it instead of clicking on landmarks also already saved neatly not only in their folders, but in their map list. When the Lindens can figure out that their user interface has too many steps for people to find their friends, places, and inventory and they use search all the time instead, they will understand the Zen of why their data base is broken all the time, and fix not the database, but their user interface. (I await explanation as to whether the pull on a dbase to get your friend by pressing on an existing calling card and the IM button takes more horsepower than the pull searching up his name, then pressing on his profile.)
The bad user interface, the lousy search engine, the general crashy laggy stuff everywhere is why group IMs are the heart of SL, so the Guardian gal and the Harvard guy need to study this more next time. Groups made by people themselves selecting topics and chat and membership and themes, not the rote routines of individual avatars making their journey from Ginko terminal to store to home.
When I need a product, I get on the groups and say, "Does anybody know where I can find a men's flannel shirt" or someone else will say, "Does anybody know if this house is sold in copies or not?" or "Is anybody else finding grey squares everywhere, is the whole game messed up or is it just me."
So people join groups to get around the game -- to navigate, to survive -- not only to socialize, and of course, to buy and sell. Each calling card list of a diva is an instant boutique where she can sell her Tupperwear subtly, through having parties or events, or directly, by describing the cool new thing she made.
Her product might be on Slexchange.com where her friends might go
In fact, where SL will really take off, where the pedal will really hit the metal, is when the Lindens can stop screwing around with stuff like making tails floppy for furries and adding more options for viewing and making machinima or porn, but when they can MAKE THE INWORLD GROUPS AVAILABLE ANY TIME OUTSIDE OF SL AND ACCESSIBLE BY THOSE BOTH INWORLD AND OUTWORLD.
Most people trying to do anything significant in SL already use a hack for this called "Yahoo Messenger" or "Skype," but eventually, the Lindens will cotton to the idea that group chat and staying in touch with friends and groups is the one thing that will keep them in the black, and they'll get busy on it. Even EA.com figured out that if they made Yahoo Messenger a visible thingie that showed up on your user panel inside of TSO, you would stay logged into TSO longer, you woldn't log off TSO to do YM. That wierd third-party connection was the only thing of its kind in TSO, that I used to marvel at, somebody had a stroke of genius on that one.
The Lindens and their insider friends keep trying to make the game turn into the World Wide Web, a series of web pages you browse through by pressing on hyperlinks. I suppose if they want to do this sort of thing they should be busier trying to turn it into Yahoo Groups or AIM or these other messengers with buddy lists where people talk either one on one or in groups in live time or with forums.
The actual world, with its actual (really virtual? truly virtual?) avatars and things like stores are important. It's important to have them. It's important to know they exist. But what's even more important is that you can talk about them any time. Most people do most of their socializing in IMs, and the fixing up of IM interface should be way more of a priority than it is if they want PEOPLE as distinct from big companies managing other people, to come in this game. Oops, oh I get it now...
Still, they have to keep up appearances. That's why it has been vital to make the group tools work better, and why I hope the new reforms will in fact make that happen (there are some obvious improvements, like getting rid of the "vote hack" to be able to send a group message normally on a normal message interface).
So how does Harvitar, the marketing guru adept at interpreting virtual worlds through research rather than wishful thinking, who is good at making his way through the weeds of SL, sell to Groupitar? Erm, carefully. The obvious idea of seducing strong leaders who are in fact brittle, and capturing their followers, who are in fact weak, the Spanish method against the Incas, can carry you far enough, but this is a virtual world and people find ways of becoming really resilient, and one of them is to sic their group on you, or to use the eject button from the group or from their land.
A particular way that LL, the oldbies, and the Harvitars have tried to establish to help them sell to individual avitars and keep their hold on commerce is to have inventory sold not be transferable. When you have an account with literally hundreds of US dollars in stuff, you really don't want an alt, and you also are heavily dependent on the maker of the item to update it or fix it if it gets broken. Of course, you may get sick of some of that inventory, but how sick can you get of your kick-ass Morpheus vehicle or your retractable, extendable, and ejaculatable prim dick? So retention of accounts that can remain in marketers' databases with networks pointing reliably to establishment profit centers is one goal.
With all the alts proliferating (it really isn't *that* much suffering to make an alt and go buy a new $3.50 US prim dick after all), Harvitar might be at a loss, but in fact, with the Lindens' hash mark thingie now enabling them instantly, at a glance to determine if an alt goes with an existing, known, paid and verified account, there's only the thin membrane between the Lindens' holding private the hash mark stuff, and their high-end third-party-partners who want to get their hands on those hash marks that identify computers. They've already got avatar keys which they can match with purchases.
Although various tekkie wiktators (I am grateful to the permabanned Eep for this term) would love to have scripts that deliver to them the names of all groups associated with each avatar's profile, there aren't LSL calls for this (yet). But either they can get it done manually, or figure out how to scrape the groups' list.
I figure if some programmers were able to scrape the land-for-sale list, judging from various accounts, the same principles should hold to scrape the groups' list.
I asked Philip Linden if he could give a report on the groups. How many? What are the largest? Oldest? Which have the most people? What topics do they make? I'm not sure why he didn't answer, but I suppose it's either that he's busy or just wants to keep the cards close to this chest. I started my own laborious search by typing in ab, then abc, etc. to try to pull up more than the 100 you get from our dumb search engine. There are LOTS of groups. And some are BIG. It would also be great to see how much they talk, how many group IMs or durations of group IM sessions they create.
So another nut of the W'u'arld that the world-to-webmeisters are going to want to crack in deconstructing our world to make their web is the groups. They are going to want to do this, some of them, due to Beth Noveck's article (especially as presidential articles come up in the U.S.). They'll also want to do this just to sell stuff.
Collision Detection goes on to theorize based on Harvitar insights about NPC clerks that morph to suit your appearance and likes. Like, if you're a furry, the clerk in the store becomes a furry. Anshe Chung knows this concept, donning a furry outfit like a cat with a tail when selling sims to Furs; letting people know she is "bi" and flirting when she is selling to GLBT, etc. But I find from dealing with customers that people don't really care what you look like if you sell real estate, which is what they are focusing on; what they are bothered by, however, is any change in your look. They wonder what it means, if their house is still there, etc.
I'm well aware of the creepy capacity of the Internet and the Internet, and the coming SLinternet (or should I call it Splinternet, since it will break up our world) to gather stuff about desires from chat. I was ushered into this private chat realm recently, some locked room not open to the general public on a forums. So we're gabbing away there on various days and I look over to the left, and I see the ads, the Google-type ads, are changing in their subject matter, depending on whatever key words it is picking out of our posts. So if I mention Free Tibet, my community, in a post, the next thing I know there are ads selling Tibetan rugs. Here you are in this so-called "private closed chat room," but the bot is picking topics out of your speech, which means of course he can scan your speech, which means of course somebody somewhere, if they want, can scan it too and pick meaning out of it rather than a chance to sell Tibetan rugs.
So...if somebody wanted to "sell to," let's say, the group Free Tibet, they might try to cajole or overthrow the group's leader, wittily called Dear Leader, or enter as an alt and start spamming about their Tibetan rugs, let's say, or use other more subtle techniques like join and lurk for awhile and listen to group chat, or come to group events, and actually see what it is people do want to buy, if anything (most just want to be left alone). Somebody might figure to put wind chimes in the marketplace which is open to be rented, or Tibetan dresses, but this takes manual field trips and work. (Of course, not only with Spin Martin'ss spinning, glitz creation of a p2p SLagat, but also more widely cast projects like slhandbook.com, the "explorers," who are really just "ad space buyers" or "media buyers" or "market share buyers" can hack away some of the weedy paths of SL.)
Naturally, the Lindens and their insider pals are adept at making mega-groups to accomplish their marketing purposes, like "Bub's Underwear Models" or "Awakening Avatars" or of course, branded, credentialed groups like the 1,600 strong Mentors/Greeters/Instructors with their internal comm system and extraordinary marketing and market-share distribution powers.
Have you ever been on one of those mailings lists in RL organized by Pepsi or the U.S. Government to either tell you about contests or about opportunities to protect our nation from terrorists by volunteering in your community? Periodically, you'll get some dorky flash thing from Pepsi or something boostery like "If You See Something Say Something" from being on these lists, and while you don't really pay attention, it enters your subconscious somewhere. You don't get off the list because getting off it sometimes involves going through a zillion menus where you suspect you are being tapped again, plus you don't want to go on record now sounding like you won't help your community when you once said you *would*. And there are those times when you go click through all the flash menus and games and win the Pepsi hat, and it makes it worth it. That's why you stay in some SL groups, well past the sell-by date, because they have some low residual of return for you now and then. A prominent FIC group recently booted my alt due to a reorganization, and my last link to spy on FIC messaging was cut. Sob.
Making mega-groups with overt advertising or covert advertising of the "hey kids come have fun and dance on our island" messaging might be one thing, especially if the mega groups can subsume some smaller more localized groups, but ultimately, to really reach the Bohos in Paradise, the Groupitars have to have real groups. That's going to force them to put on real events and do real stuff, and they haven't figured out that if anything, the world online isn't mass, and big, and viral like they thought, especially in SL, because of all the checkgates. If anything, they might come to the same conclusion of Raph Koster blogging about Cory Doctorow (which I don't completely agree with) that the new social technologies only lead us back to the same old parlour games and parlour conversations, the same old little group around the campfire. It seems like an awful lot of trouble to have gone through, when we could have just turned to the people we live with, or next door to, in real life, to achieve the same effect, but then, for all kinds of reasons, they aren't in touch with our souls, and Second Life is.