Social Media | Second Life Shrink

Taxing issues

April 11, 2010 by johnny Leave a comment

My prediction that the election campaign would be “exciting” was perhaps a little optimistic, but the focus has been on the economy, as I was expecting. The debate so far has centred around the issue of National Insurance levels, though this clearly is just a proxy for the real divide between the main parties, which is on the level of short-term cuts in public sector spending that are needed to stabilise the economy. My sense is that Labour are doing better than expected in the early exchanges, since they seem to have more credible numbers, whereas the Tories are rather unbelievably claiming that the £6 billion they need to cover the cost of not raising NI can be found through “efficiency savings” that won’t have any detrimental effect on services.

There have been comparisons drawn with Ireland, where the government have severely reined in public spending, thus reducing their deficit in absolute terms, but with the result that the economy has shrunk even faster, meaning that the deficit is now actually bigger as a proportion of GDP. This would seem to suggest that the Labour strategy of (relatively) gentle cuts in UK government spending is the right one, or the least wrong one at any rate.

However Labour’s reputation for general economic competence has obviously been undermined by the fact that they led us into the recession in the first place, and the voters’ desire for change may be enough to carry the Tories into power. There have been some signs that Labour may try to play up the class element of the debate, which I would have thought would be the way to go – “No Cuts, Tax the Rich” would be a good slogan – but they have just promised not to increase income tax, while leaving the door open for a hike in the regressive VAT, so I don’t hold out much hope of a sharp shift to the left.

It will be interesting to see the effect that the televised leaders’ debate this week has on the polls. I like to think that the UK electorate is completely focussed on the issues, and is too smart to be distracted by presidential-style personality contests, but I expect I will be proved wrong about that.

Finally, the most amusing story of the campaign so far is that of Stuart MacLennan, the (now ex-) Labour candidate for Moray in north-east Scotland, who was forced to resign after the papers reported that he had made various offensive comments about political opponents and his prospective constituents on Twitter. I would have thought that the first thing to do when standing for public office would be to delete your Twitter feed, since the last thing you want the voters to know is what is really on your mind.

Filed under Economics, Politics Tagged with Economics, Politics, Social Media

Falling into the chasm

March 18, 2010 by johnny Leave a comment

It was reported yesterday that Facebook had overtaken Google to become the most popular website in the US last week. The social networking site gathered 7.07% of total hits (up 185% on last year), marginally ahead of Google’s 7.03%.

Pundits are suggesting that this is an indication of how people are increasingly using the internet in a different way – instead of searching for information, the theory goes, we are now looking more for social connections.

As we’ve noted before, this type of thinking seems to be driving Linden Lab’s corporate strategy, as they try to market Second Life as a social networking application. They clearly have some way to go to compete with Facebook though, both in the raw numbers – FB has a user base of 400 million, and concurrency of up to a million, against SL‘s figures of 18 million and 80,000 respectively – and in terms of cultural penetration. Major newspapers are still publishing articles that assume that the majority of their readers will never have heard of Second Life, while Facebook references can be found even in traditionally conservative media like legacy comics.

Grace McDunnough posted an interesting piece (illuminating comments too) on the Lab’s marketing strategy a couple of days ago. Referencing a recent Harvard Business School case study, which itself draws on Geoffrey Moore‘s influential 1991 book Crossing the Chasm, Grace concludes that the educational market is a bust, the “adult” market is an embarrassment, and that content creators are being slowly sidelined. What does this leave? A 3D chat service, or, as Grace puts it, “playing house with paper dolls”.

This rings sadly true to me, and seems a terrible waste of the platform’s potential, but I guess there’s no arguing with market forces. It seems that the early adopter community (in which I count myself spiritually, if not strictly speaking temporally) is going to find itself increasingly marginalised. We can only hope that the Facebookisation of Second Life turns into a complete fiasco, M. Linden gets his cards, and a more enlightened management goes back to the original, steady (if limited) business model of taking money from people like me, who are willing to pay a few bucks a month to live out the life of the mind in a virtual world.

Filed under Economics, Second Life Tagged with Economics, Internet, Second Life, Social Media, Statistics

Monetising SL 2.0

February 25, 2010 by johnny Leave a comment

I feel that I should download the SL 2.0 viewer, just so that I can have an opinion about it, and join in the general excitement, but I’m finding it hard to get enthusiastic about what is, after all, just a gateway to the really interesting part of Second Life, that is the content and the community. When I first signed up to SL a couple of years ago I downloaded the alpha build of the Linux client, and I was happy with that until fairly recently, when the Lab started restricting which viewers you could log in with and it stopped working. I switched to the then-current version of Snowglobe, which I have had no major complaints about.

I’ve never been entirely convinced that making the viewer more user-friendly was the key to broadening SL‘s appeal. I guess the Lab did some consumer research that told them that the viewer’s rather steep learning-curve was contributing to SL‘s woeful retention rate, and I’m sure that the new version makes it a bit easier to get through the first hour, but I would have thought that keeping people on board for months and years would depend more on the nature of the virtual world and its residents than the bells and whistles of the client software.

Though maybe I’m overstating the importance of content. The BBC are currently running a series The Virtual Revolution (which you can watch online if you live in the UK), which is taking a look at the impact on society of the growth of the internet in the last 20 years. It’s necessarily broad, and there’s been nothing terribly surprising, but it’s still interesting, particularly the discussion of how Web 2.0 has been monetised. Services like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter may get their user-generated content for free, but most of it is worthless junk. That doesn’t matter though, the theory goes, because as users post, search, rate and comment on all those videos, updates and tweets, they reveal a mass of valuable data about themselves and their social networks, information that can be profitably mined for targeted advertising.

One can’t help but wonder if the Lindens have some similar plan in mind. They have certainly been talking up the social-networking aspects of SL, with their purchase of Avatars United, and Wallace Linden’s suggestion that we should all link our real identities to our avatars. If they could find out all about us and our interests, they could turn that into a revenue stream, provided they could figure out how to serve up the ads in a way that wasn’t too annoying. Perhaps the much-touted URL-on-a-prim functionality of the 2.0 viewer is part of the Lab’s plan to sneak pop-up advertising into the virtual landscape.

Filed under Culture, Economics, Second Life Tagged with Culture, Economics, Internet, Second Life, Social Media, TV

Tweetomania

November 27, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

I hate to admit it, but, way behind the curve as usual, I have started to view Twitter as an important part of my life, rather than a pointless irritant. When I set up our feed I was intending just to use it for publicising blog posts, but then I started following a couple of people (you know, just for kicks), then a couple more (though I could have given up any time I wanted, I just didn’t want to, right?), and before I knew it I was getting mildly agitated if I couldn’t get my tweet fix several times a day.

The tipping point came when I started following Mal Burns, who is a one-man SL newsfeed, cranking out dozens of tweets a day linking to all sorts of interesting metaverse stories. He seems to have quite a big audience, judging by the surge of traffic we have had on the couple of occasions he has featured one of our posts.

Our feed is somewhat less influential, though we do have a few followers, including one celebrity, Noreena Hertz, the vaguely left-wing economist, though I expect that by the time you read this she will have ditched us – she’s done the follow/unfollow thing on us a few times before, so I suspect that she has some sort of system that automatically follows anyone tweeting with the #economics tag, and then one of her assistants kicks us off a couple of days later when they actually read the rubbish we have written. Interestingly, our old SLS account has roughly ten times as many followers as our active feed, despite not being updated for nearly a year.

My addiction has been facilitated by my acquisition of the TweetDeck app for my iPhone, which makes it much easier to post updates and follow the general chatter. TweetDeck is part of the huge ecosystem that has grown up around Twitter, with literally hundreds of startups vying for a slice of the revenue pie, which, last time I looked, amounted to exactly US$0. Twitter head honcho Biz Stone has reportedly targeted 2010 as “the revenue year”, but even he isn’t willing to predict that the company will be profitable any time soon, so I can’t see how all the hangers-on are hoping to make any money.

I have a horrible feeling that the whole set-up is some kind of plot to get us all hooked on free produce, before they crank up the price and force us to pay big bucks to feed our habits. That wouldn’t be entirely bad news for me though, since I am qualified in the treatment of cyberaddiction, and the tweet-detox market might be worth quite a bit.

Filed under Economics, Psychology, Second Life Tagged with Addiction, Economics, Psychology, Second Life, Social Media

I want to spin my little watch right before your eyes

September 4, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

My Twitter feed is gradually accumulating a small band of adherents, all of whom, I am sure, are keen to digest my scintillating prose, rather than just following people at random as part of a Twitter-spam operation or SEO scam.

Quimbe, one of my new buddies, has been especially keen to share with me an amazing opportunity he has unearthed. Do I want to ” Discover A Rebel Psychiatrist’s Amazing Secret?” One that will let me “Put People Under Your Control Quickly & Easily … and Get Them to Do Anything You Want?” Well, who doesn’t? This arcane knowledge can be mine for only $197, thanks to the amazing generosity of master hypnotist Igor Ledochowski.

Actually, what Igor is peddling is not particularly new, drawing as it does on the work of the fairly well-known American psychiatrist Milton Erickson, pioneer of hypnotherapy back in the ’50’s. Erikson had a somewhat idiosyncratic concept of the unconscious as an entity whose therapeutic power could be tapped by entering into a hypnotic trance, which he famously could induce in a subject using only his secret handshake. Erikson’s ideas were always on the fringe of respectability, and his modern-day followers, most notably practitioners of Neuro-linguistic programming, which draws heavily on his work, are largely confined to the life-coaching and self-improvement industries.

Igor may not have much clinical credibility, but he does show some appreciation of modern business trends. He used to charge thousands of dollars for his seminars (he says), but there was a physical limit on how many of these he could do, and also a small pool of potential customers, for whose attention he had to compete with all the other gurus out there. With the advent of digital distribution channels he has been able to benefit from a new, and much more lucrative, revenue model – mass circulation and (relatively) micro-payment.

All this came to mind today when I read about the travails of the Second Life music scene. Apparently musicians and venue owners are struggling to get audiences to pay anything at all for their live music experience. Mankind Tracer, alter-ego of musician Seth Regan, is proposing that venues start charging a cover, and he feels that L$500 would be about right for one of his performances, though comments on the thread suggest that people think this would be too much for the market to bear.

My first thought was that if punters won’t pay US$2 to see your band then you probably need to practice a bit more. I’m not out much these days, but back when I was an avid gig-goer I would regularly pay US$10 or more to get into a club without even knowing who was playing. I guess the difference is that in real life even if the band sucks you can still have a good time, because you are in a bar, with your friends, but in SL if the act is no good then the night is a washout.

Even if we take the stinginess of virtual audiences as a given, it should still be possible to make good money if you put on show that is good enough to draw a big crowd. If you played to ten thousand people you’d still do OK even if 90% of them paid nothing at all and the rest coughed up a dollar apiece, and even better if you dropped the suggested tip to 25c and half of them put their hands in their pockets.

The problem is that this mass-audience/micro-payment plan requires a scalability that Second Life currently does not provide. Full sims can theoretically support up to 100 avatars, though on the rare occasions when I’ve been somewhere with more than a couple of dozen or so other people (which have all been music events, interestingly) the experience has not been particularly enjoyable. So even if your band could pull in a five-figure crowd (which is not entirely unrealistic, given the potential world-wide reach), the sim would crash long before you started making money.

Blue Mars, which has (finally) gone into public beta this month, promises the capacity that could make this model work. If that turns out to be true, virtual musicians on that platform might get the rewards they deserve.

There are certainly some bands I’d pay L$500 to virtually see…

Filed under Culture, Economics, Psychology, Second Life Tagged with Culture, Economics, Music, Psychology, Second Life, Social Media

Deliver us from Facebook

August 14, 2009 by johnny Leave a comment

Reading Archbishop Vincent Nichols’ thoughts on the evils of social media made me think that I should give it another go, since, generally speaking, anything that the Catholic Church is opposed to, I’m in favour of. (Though the Vatican is giving out mixed messages on this subject; the Pope himself is on Facebook).

Regular readers will recall our last dalliance with Twitter. I was reluctant to tarnish the Zen-like purity of that single-tweet feed (which, despite a six-month silence, has managed to garner 61 followers, perhaps disproving the theory that Twitter users need constant gratification), so I set up a new account in my name, and while I was at it signed up for Plurk and Friendfeed too.

I’m not intending to document all the humdrum details of my life, but just to publicise this blog by sending out tweets and plurks whenever I put up a new post. I’ve set the services up so that they all cross-post each other; the resulting feedback will hopefully get the message out. What I’d read about Friendfeed had led me to believe that there would be some way to automatically submit posts to places like Digg, reddit and Stumbleupon too, but that doesn’t seem to be possible. Maybe I need to read the instructions some more. There’s probably some other service that I haven’t heard about that will do that, since I can’t believe that no one would have thought of developing such a useful thing.

Anyway, all this took a few hours, which, on reflection, would probably have been better spent just writing something interesting. “Content is King” used to be the mantra, but in our Twitterfied world it seems that what you say is a becoming less important than how many “friends” you have to say it to, whether or not they are really listening. Maybe the good bishop had a point after all.

Filed under Blogging Tagged with Blogging, Social Media

← Older posts

Newer posts →

Top Posts

Archives

License