I promise not to turn this blog into a controversy-fest, but this last week of the year has given me time to weigh in on some of the discussions that have been brewing recently. On Apophenia, Danah Boyd wrote that she’s recently “become very irritated by the immersive virtual questions i’ve been getting”.

My response is below:

Danah,

Interesting post, but I’m not quite sure what the core of your argument is or why you find the virtual world questions so infuriating.

Reading closely, it would seem that your basic argument is that “social tech is not about divorcing the physical to live virtually” and your irritation comes from the fact that “techno-futurists” keep “re-instating this fantasy as the utopian end-all be-all of technology”.

First, let me disclose my bias. Prior to founding Millions of Us, a social media agency specializing in bringing real world companies into virtual worlds, I was the Evangelist for Linden Lab. So I am definitely one of the people irritating you but I’ve also been thinking about this stuff for a few years.

The appeal of Second Life has very little to do with physical vs. virtual. While there is a subset of the user base that prefers online interactions to real-world ones, the majority are simply augmenting their existing lives with Second Life. There are many reasons why this is appealing,but most of them are so similar to Myspace and other well-understood social sites as to make analysis uneccessary. Perhaps the most important difference is that unlike web-based communities, Second Life brings a concept of “place” with it. The impact of this on shared experience and culture is non-trivial — it results in a common set of visual references that make the overall cultural experience all the more powerful.

I agree with you that most people’s social networks and communications are confined to people they already know and that online spaces usually reflect that. In Second Life, the same is true with a few critical differences. First, the friend-of-a-friend concept can be taken a little further because somebody you know can actually introduce you to somebody in real time. Secondly (and this is the really interesting one), social interaction is the key driver of adoption. Second Life’s growth from Day 1 has been a result of word of mouth and press coverage. I discuss the press coverage here¬† and the word of mouth is pretty easy to understand. The interesting thing is that the strongest indicator of whether a user will stick around is whether or not they meet someone and form a relationship with them.

Finally, a word about the #’s. Clay’s big criticism is that the #’s are inflated by lots of Looky-Loo’s and are not in-line with industry standard reporting metrics. My question is, “What Industry Standard Metrics Should Be Used?”. Second Life lies at the union of web-based social sites and MMOG’s but the metrics for each of these don’t quite work for it. The implication being made is that there is some sort of deliberate sleight of hand being performed on the #’s. The truth, I think, is that it’s just plain hard to figure out what #’s/standards to apply. Second Life is NOT an advertising supported website and therefore Commscore #’s and the like are not particularly relevant. On the other end of the spectrum, the #’s typically reported by makers of MMOG’s radically undervalue Second Life’s population because they only reflect paying users. While this appears to be level-headed, it’s also offbase because the small percentage of paying “landowners” in Second Life are able to pay very high monthly fees because those fees are offset by their sales of virtual goods to “non-paying” users.

In any case, I’m gratified to see that you and others are beginning to scrutinize Second Life. I only wish that your commentary contained less of the “Second Life infuriates me” sentiment and more unbiased analysis.

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