I wonder what all my years of sojourn among the geeks is worth if I don't have an invitation to Google+ yet, but I've been reading about it, and today the Times suggested that Google+, the new social network Google has in beta competing with Facebook, has a "killer app" in combination with Hangout, it's socializing tool that enables real-time video communication in groups.
I don't know if the lightbulb has gone off in Rod Humble's head yet, but instead of (or in addition to) referring to Second Life as a "shared creativity tool" he should start buzzing about "real-time f2f face shared-space socializing" or something that lets the world know that Second Life has already been around for seven years doing exactly what Google+ and Hangout are doing on video -- and better (because you are all actually in the same room, able to manipulate content together.)
I used to wonder in the early years whether Second Life would be completely obviated by having video become more interactive and ubiquitous. When everybody has a cam that is interactive in real time, and you put them all together in an Internet-facilitated room like Hollywood Squares, and when video conferencing becomes better and cheaper and easier, why would you need to fumble with avatars and downloading clients and fussing with a wonky UI?
Answer: because it's not enough, you can't control your environment and you can't introduce user-generated content with ease through the barrier of the squares.
I haven't seen how the Google+ Hangout works yet, although I did see the Lifehacker Youtube, but if it is merely panning around in serial fashion to each person talking in a row sort of like Hollywood Squares (Hollywood Bars?), it's not all in a room at once, really. After all, when a bunch of video talking heads bump together in a shared space, they aren't reaching into each other's space or sharing a common space where they can do things in common. That is, all those Lifehacker geeks are all yucking and loling up a storm, but that's because they are already in the shared space of their work or their cliques --
(I'm also reading that Skype charges for group chat and Google isn't going to charge at first.)
To be sure, it might be thrilling in that shared space on Hangout -- like it is on Yahoo Messenger to paint together or push elements in pictures together -- to share a Youtube and do a karaoke.
But...that's actually been a feature of Second Life in viewer 2 for more than a year -- get together in your Second Life virtual home, put up a prim on the wall, and find your Youtube to show off to somebody. Sing along in Voice if you like. Of course, in SL there is the issue that not everyone is looking at the same stream -- there's a Zen Koan to this that involves everybody not stepping into the same stream but seeing their own at the same time, but not exactly.
Time until Google+ Hangout turns into Chat Roulette -- with the statistical given that we know from Second Life, too, that in anonymous social situations, men inevitably turn to showing you and each other their penises?
Well, supposedly, by having known people with names on a Facebook-like network, you remove that. Oh? But it isn't Facebook. Gmail is filled with nicknames. Google+ may make its mark in fact being the anonymous network that you don't have to put in a real name for -- we'll see.
In fact, if your first answer to my question posed here is "Oh, no, never, because SL enables anonymous avatars" -- what if Google enables anonymous real-human accounts? That aren't tied to real name or place? To be sure, you can't easily change your gender then or other attributes, but you do get a level of anonymity. Just ask the maker of Chat Roulette!
But aside from the flying phallus problem, didn't the demise of Loic Lemeur's video talking and sharing site, Seesmic, teach anybody anything? "Video conversation was too early," he tells Mashable. "It did not grow beyond a great but small community and wasn’t viable,” explains Le Meur."
Well, exactly. I remember I kept meaning to join this well-meaning Seesmic, and never did. For one, I had only a really crappy $30 Radio Shack video camera, but I didn't feel like fussing with video cameras or Skype video or anything. It just didn't feel as easy to me as Second Life.
Has the appetite for video conversation grown? Oh, if a lot of carefully-groomed geeks in the beta claim it's the latest cool thing, it may get a big surge, but I think most people will be a bit more cautious. It's not that it's early. It's that it's not for everybody. After all, not "everybody" has a video cam, and even those that do, don't cyber with it.
The big lesson for me lately in Second Life, with the travails of Viewer 2, is just how much people have stage-fright, or don't like being online in a situation where they feel compromised, or don't want to be "shining on". Trying to make their entry into the virtual world easier, to get past hazing or confusion, is critical. And remember the power curve: 10 percent of the population make most of the content for the other 90 percent.
I see the main problems (that Loic also had to deal with and others with this kind of service) for Google:
o Privacy -- once the videos start easily spreading out of the originally trusted smaller circles, once the URLs and the other data can be grabbed from the shared media (RedZone anyone?), privacy will be compromised and people will feel burned -- they always do, even as geeks like Reid Hoffman keep egging everybody on to give, give, give more, more, more data so he can become rich. The issue has already surfaced, as the Financial Times reports, and Google is putting the fix in after complaints in beta, instead of fixing it before it reached beta, which isn't reassuring, as it was an obvious no-brainer problem. And likely one not fixable, for the reasons Jeff Jarvis says, about the impossibility of stopping the spread of information on the Internet. It will be interesting to see what sort of fix Google does put in to prevent Circles from going outside their Circles...
o Governance -- there's the phalluses, and then there's the shared media -- the demand for media shifting, as Fred Wilson has explained it, that fuels "innovation". Not just sharing a clip from Youtube, but then sharing it to others throughout the system, so that it becomes a new channel of unlawful distribution even less controllable than Youtube, which is a non-real-time interactive service. Once Youtube bleeds through all the real-time Google+ Hangout chat groups, copyright is even more compromised. Some will say they don't care, embrace the inevitable. OK, do tell me your plan for making money for artists and distributors. Ads to click on while you're in your Hangout chat room?
o Inability to control your environment -- unlike what Google Hangout sounds like, the richness of Second Life involves being able to manipulate not only your own presentation to the world in the avatar, but to make homes and offices and planets and whatever -- and in real-time, to enable people to build together. You can all in a room construct the same data visualization, or try on the same dresses or examine the same pieces of furniture or read the same texts. As I understand it, the Google thing will involve serial panning of a camera. The wall isn't broken through. Yet people will want it to be. Then they want creativity -- and they want sex. On Facebook, people are content to remain for hours showing video links or links to blogs or pictures, asynchronously, but at least, within a few seconds. Google might speed that up with Hangout. But both are still limited by contrast with what you can do when you really have shared real-time creativity. It's like a friend of mine said last night in Second Life -- describing a feeling that I recall vividly from The Sims Online -- when another human being can come online, go shopping with you and try on a dress, and buy it for you for under $3.00, it's quite something. How many women in real life have the experience of a boyfriend or husband who takes them out and buys them a mink coat? Very few, really. In SL, millions can have that experience. Oh, it's not the same? Well isn't it even better, for having the ease, and for not having to kill any RL minx?!
o Governance -- with the burst of creativity and sex online comes the usual range of issues like copyright and adult behaviour and child pornography and gambling -- they all come in a rush, and Second Life has worked its way through every one of these issues, developing policies, banning, segregating, pruning. Google proved with Lively, their failed virtual world, that they were completely uninterested in governance -- griefers could invade your space and mess up some of your communication tools and the abuse report never went anywhere, there wasn't the granularity of controls on the space that Second Life built up with long experience, and the short-lived but effective Metaplace by Raph Koster also developed. Governance is what you should start virtual worlds with -- and this is a kind of virtual world, this Google Hangout -- not what you should end with, and yet it's unlikely that in the rush to compete with Facebook and the Microsoft buyout of Skype, that a lot of thought has gone into how to govern the Hangouts.
o Archipelago of Egos -- I always used to discuss the myriad private islands in Second Life, with their closeknit, claustrophobic little socializing groups, some of them very elite and restrictive, some of them even sinister (Goreans), as the antithesis of an open society. It was like the cells of Communism, and the atomized but collectivized pseudo-institutions of Soviet life in a way, where people couldn't communicate horizontally, but where policies and communications took place in a heavily-controlled vertical space. Imagine if you are not invited into a Google Hangout. Imagine if only the cool kids get to go here or there.
In fact, such honeycombed worlds become very brittle and vulnerable to memes. It is very, very easy to take seemingly independent little grouplets and spread rumours and disinformation through them -- oddly enough, the rigidity with which they isolate themselves also makes them incapable of tolerance and diversity in debating the rumours they hear.
Second Lifers are big users of other social media like Twitter and Facebook and Plurk and Skype. You go to Skype when you want to "get outside the game" and make sure your conversation is not recorded -- at least, not recorded by people who will use it to ban you from the virtual world. Lovers in SL turn to Skype as well, they shift back and forth between the avatar and the real person -- but it's the avatar that enables people who are removed in space and time to be able to actually build something together, or make love.
Perhaps Google+/Hangout will increase the appetite for virtual worlds, and perhaps they will get working better by the time there is really a pressure of millions wanting this. Perhaps not. It might still be at the small number of people that Loic attracted -- even using the considerable power of the Google ad agency to hustle more participation.
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