JoelFoner.com

I often see calculations showing the total number of people involved with social media, MMOs and virtual worlds. These calculations have been making me more uncomfortable of late, as the statistics seem only partially valid to me. I think it’s time to stop gaming the size of the universe. What does this mean, anyway? It means playing with statistics to overstate the number of people involved in social media, MMOs and virtual worlds.

Here is the standard playbook for gaming the size of the universe:

1) Make a list of companies and systems in the space of interest (Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, MySpace etc for social media, World Of Warcraft, Lord Of the Rings Online, Second Life, Blue Mars, IMVU etc for massively multiplayer games and virtual worlds)

2) Compile a list of the number of users on each system

3) Add up the numbers from each system to create a total

4) Proclaim that the total people involved is the total number of users of that category of system

The number sounds nice. Unfortunately the result is likely to be significantly overstated.

Why is this not a legitimate way to calculate the size of the social media or MMO/virtual world universe? In a word, duplication.

In my experience, people who are active in social media, MMO’s and virtual worlds tend to be involved in many systems. As far as I can tell, a significant percent of people who are active in social media, MMOs and virtual worlds will create an account on multiple (in some cases all known) new systems to check them out.

I do not have access to the information that it would take to de-duplicate the lists, and there is essentially no incentive nor ability given privacy and competitive concerns for these disparate companies to share their user lists. I think it would, however be interesting to see a fully de-duplicated count — a count de-duplicated both within each system (person who operates multiple accounts would then count as “1″) and across systems (person who has accounts on multiple systems counts as “1″).

The other little hitch is the definition of a “user.” How do you define user to count active users, and to disregard accounts that may have been created and abandoned? Do the various companies involved have any consistent definition for this statistic?

Until we somehow see that result, can we all see our way to not claiming that the universe is Twitter + Facebook + LinkedIn + … or World of Warcraft + Lord of the Rings Online + Second Life + Blue Mars + IMVU…  ?

My hunch is that it’s much closer to the size of the largest of the systems, rather than a sum of the separate ones, but that remains to be proven somehow, someday, once there is a universal common login (now I’m completely dreaming!)

Thanks for reading… all comments welcomed!

“Part 2—Working Measures Of Virtual World Engagement and ROI”

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Dec 29th, we will be at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

Part 2—Working Measures Of Virtual World Engagement and ROI (Return On Investment)

In our last session, we attempted to arrive at key measures to determine “The ROI” and “Virtual World Engagement” for virtual world and social media projects. I say “attempted” because we ended up with a variety of different positions and views on what constitutes the value center for engagement and ROI. Ultimately we decided that there is no single measure of value or ROI (other than dollars at the end game for business projects which could be measured in multiple ways, and measurable improvement of some sort for educational and social action projects.)

At the close of the discussion there was strong consensus that we needed another session on this topic. Actually it was closer to “we are going to continue this,” and so we will!

We decided that the path to metrics is to build a catalog of prototypical goals for various project scenarios in business, education and social action, with the premise that this will lead to some specific measures.

Please bring Read more…

“Forterra And Metaplace Go Boom: What Does This Mean?”

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Dec 22nd, we will be at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

“Forterra And Metaplace Go Boom: What Does This Mean?”

The closure of two virtual world platforms have just come to light in as many weeks. The first “not quite announcement” was Erica Driver’s Tweet on December 18th: “It’s a sad day for the emerging immersive software sector. Forterra laid off 60% of its workforce. Remaining assets likely to be sold.” While there appears to be no public confirmation of this announcement, through various conversations I have reason to believe that we’ll be hearing something more about this turn of events, and that it is not rumor. The second announcement showed up in email directly from Metaplace, titled “metaplace.com is closing on january 1, 2010.” This email was written from this Metaplace blog post. The blog post suggests that the Metaplace environment that we know will be shutting down, and that there will be some new strategic direction undertaken by the remains of the organization.

What do these announcements mean? Do they indicate something more general about the viability of virtual worlds? Do they indicate the relative viability of business, consumer and educationally focused virtual world operations? What do we think the root causes for these companies to not reach critical mass, and are future attempts (ones that we know about or others that are not yet released) more or less likely to succeed?

(We had planned to continue our virtual world ROI discussion this week. I thought it would be more timely to have this discussion and then pick up the ROI discussion again next week after the holidays. See you soon!)

Join us Tuesday at 12PM noon SL, and thanks for being part of “We Are The Network”!

Best regards,

Joel

Reading links below – have fun and see you soon! Read more…

I thought I’d write a post explaining some of the oddities of WiFi, why your wireless Internet performance can go from great to miserable in a matter of moments, and what you can do to improve the situation when your router decides to be “decidedly unhelpful.” Wireless connections can be an invisible and frustrating part of Internet connectivity, especially when you are running online voice, video and high bandwidth video games. This post explains some of the reasons for wireless system behavior, and how to improve the behavior and reliability of your wireless system.

Could Your Router Be Working Against You, Without You Noticing? Read more…

“Working Measures Of Virtual World Engagement and ROI”

Please join us for a discussion every Tuesday at 12PM noon SL (US Pacific Time)

This Tuesday, Dec 15th, we will be at the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

Click here to teleport to the Epoch Institute in Second Life™

This Week’s Topic

Working Measures Of Virtual World Engagement and ROI

Have you noticed a pattern in the published descriptions of virtual world projects? I’ve noticed a prototypical write-up pattern that usually answers the following questions in sequence: Who sponsored the project? Who is supposed to be interested in using the virtual environment, and to what end? What interesting or “shiny” features of the build or programming were included? It is, however, all too common that a critical piece of the write-up is missing. Read more…

Joel Foner 2009-12-06
* Added the “How To Make Your Viewer Run Even Faster (when you really need the most you can get!)” section

Joel Foner 2009-12-08
* Added “Stay Plugged In” (thanks to Ignatius Onomatopoea for this tip)

Introduction

Second Life™ provides a 3D visualization of virtual environments, dynamically rendered so that you can make changes and any other avatar within sight sees those changes in almost real time. The technologies underpinning these capabilities are complex and place serious demands on the CPU and 3D graphics accelerator on your local computer.

The good news is that all of this is possible. The bad news is that there are a lot of moving parts and it uses a lot of computing and graphics horsepower to get the job done. The performance you see depends on many things. There are many factors that determine the performance you see, including the speed of your computer’s 3D graphics processor, the main processor (CPU), your hard disk speed, how much RAM (memory) your computer has, network stability, network speed, how many avatars are in view, how many avatars are on the region that your avatar is standing on, other load factors on the region, as well as specific characteristics of how the scene is built.

This article shows how to improve the operating speed of the viewer on low performance computer hardware. These steps will only cover optimization of your computer, and will not include addressing other potential sources of performance problems.

Please note that this article assumes you have some Second Life™ experience, and that you are comfortable with opening menus and making settings changes in the Preferences pages in the viewer.

But I Just Bought A Machine. How Could It Be Low Performance?

You may have bought a computer pretty recently, and assumed “this machine is pretty new, so of course its 3D graphics performance must be good”. You could be in for a surprise. In this age of Read more…

The New Mainstream 3D Virtual World Project

Today’s mainstream users of 3D virtual worlds have expectations and needs that do not match those of pioneering explorers of these platforms. New projects are measured in different ways, and expecting a mainstream project to be successful using an explorer’s strategy is like expecting that you can win a road race riding a tricycle.

Early 3D virtual world experiments were driven by explorers trying to push the boundaries of possibility. These projects tested the feasibility of ways that a 3D virtual world could be used, and focused on trial scenarios to prove or disprove a particular usage theory. Success was often measured on technical terms, with users whose involvement was project focused and short term.

Mainstream projects take feasibility as a given, and create an environment to support day to day use by the regular members of an organization — as an educational platform, a place to enable distributed teamwork for global companies and academic institutions, as a virtual classroom environment, or a “better conference call”.

Mainstream projects have user-driven success metrics. Merely passing the “it works” test does not mean automatic project success. Successful mainstream projects result in “normal users” who are happy with the environment, find it to be compelling, continue to use it willingly and recommend its use to others. They judge the environment on how it improves their day to day experience while doing their real work, not based on whether it is a cool technology or has promising possibilities. They also have limited motivation to learn a new environment as an exploratory exercise, and must find value in the experience quickly in order to justify additional effort.

Mainstream 3D Virtual World Project Success Factors

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Virtual world event management is, in the large, similar to real life event management. You’ve got to make sure that guests and performers are lined up, that marketing and advertising is effective, and if it is a broadcast event, that the technical and support staff logistics have been completed. Security is a bit different in virtual world settings, and requires special handling in order to avoid enabling disruptions at your event. This post focuses on some specifics for Second Life™ security management; however, the principles are similar for other virtual world platforms.

Event Disruption Categories

• Purposeful region crashes (exploiting a bug to cause the region to crash “on demand”)
• Littering (leaving objects in inconvenient places, placing them out during an event, or moving them around in the way of the event)
• Pollution (planting a particle generator that creates a spray of smoke, fog or distasteful imagery)
• Disruptive chat or voice participation

Must-Do Security Checks

Read more…