Business & Games: The Blog

The topic of the post is the recent flood of 3D virtual worlds running inside the browser (Lively/WebFlock), providing very little besides the option to ‘interact’ with other users through chat. The article is well worth a read, but I quoted his conclusion and the comment I left:

“What enabled this “moment of change” was the in-world creation tools, that enabled co-creation and a new form of collaboration. Chatting in a 3D environment may be good, but extending that chat with 3D forms of expression gives us a whole new way of communicating. “

I definitely agree with the first part [of the original post], virtual environments are about more than ‘chatting in 3D’ but remember ‘not everyone wants to be a designer’. Only a small percentage of Flickr users, youTube users, blog readers etc actually participates in content creation. The other 95%+ just enjoys browsing the content for either entertainment, information or application.

I don’t particularly like Rosedales ‘anecdote’ for a collaborative model because lets face it, if Second Life was build for 3D collaboration they could have done a lot better, and furthermore, the actual use of Second Life as a digital ‘canvas’ is fairly limited. Its not about creating things together, its about the ability to provide diverse, niche context. Niche enough to become a topic of conversation. You can’t create that in a development team, its impossible to create content that interests every single niche (and the more niche, the more passionate people are about the topic because it starts to define them). However, when the creation of this content is placed in the hands of the users themselves to express these niche interests they are passionate about, it becomes possible to provide this niche content, effectively filling the ‘long tail’ of social context.

So the free content creation, even by a small percentage of total users, provides the platform with the ’social object’ for others to use - like clips on youTube and pictures on flickr. It’s the topic of conversation - the icebreaker to approach a stranger and just start talking about a shared interest. Lively and other chatrelated worlds lack this incentive because largely they are still being developed by a small group of developers. They develop for the masses - missing out on the long tail of social context that feeds 99% of social interactions on social networks.

PS - Lively is about to provide these tools, though the advantage of Second Life is it provides these tools inside the application itself, stimulating the creation and thereby social interaction tremendously.

(Image by Wagner James Au of New World Notes)

Original Post: http://digado.nl/the-long-tail-of-social-context.html