Tag Archives: Google Lively

How do virtual worlds build community?

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More virtual worlds and virtual world projects are shutting down. Some may remember Google Lively died a year ago. More recently it’s been vSide, Metaplace, and now Project Wonderland. It really does seem to be the end of Virtual Worlds 1.0. I and a few others have even begun to ponder what will be part of Virtual Worlds 2.0 – rise from the ashes of 1.0? But it’s also a good time to review lessons learned.

Community is a chicken and egg thing

As the old saying goes, there is no shortcut to success. The strategy for most Virtual Worlds 1.0 revolved around a thriving community to interact with and supply content (User Generated Content – UGC). All you needed was an instant community, and apparently you get those by developing some cool technology like 3D scenes, avatars, etc. However at the same time user studies were showing that all that technology still wasn’t enough for typical users. It was essential that they capture a community – it was a chicken and egg problem.

How do you solve the chicken and egg problem, well virtual worlds tried to tackle this in various ways:

Google Lively
Google Lively launched hoping the Google name would bring so many users that enough would stick. But not that many stuck as this Google Trends graph shows.

It also didn’t help that the odd collection of avatars left users utterly confused as to the context of the world.

IMVU
One of the first movers in the 3D chat space, IMVU relied heavily on AdWords to drive early traffic. Being a first mover, IMVU also wasn’t paying much for those AdWords. Eventually they were able to tweak their product enough to find market fit and amass  a community. A community heavily based on flirting but a community none the less.

Metaplace
Founded by game design legend Raph Koster, Metaplace’s approach was to appeal to game designers. They built some powerful scripting tools, however that presented its own problem as Simon Newstead’s , CEO & Co-Founder of Frenzoo, pointed out:

3/ Built for the builders, but not for the mainstream users

This one is a bit clearer, there was a great amount of feature support and tools added for world builders, but less tools or attractions for your average every day user.  It seemed like a classic chicken and egg situation – not enough users for attracting game devs, and not enough games/content to attract users?  The existing games on the site were ok but not up to the same level as many great flash games now, and the social elements and avatar stickiness perhaps wasn’t up to many average users expect.  Perhaps MP should have jumpstarted some high quality gaming with internal development and showcase, and in parallel giving users something to get hooked on…

Of course IMVU’s strategy was the most successful, but it’s a little difficult to duplicate as the first mover advantage is gone.

Build community the old-fashioned way – around a product

Just as Google came out of Web 1.0, some virtual worlds will rise from the ashes and drive into Virtual Worlds 2.o. I think Frenzoo is one such world.

It started out as a fashion site, heavily sided toward user generated content. They made it easy to design your own 3D clothing and model it on an avatar. But that was about it when it started in 2008 – no virtual world or personal scenes. However I could create my own fashionable outfit. From day one it filled a need – how many girls dream of becoming fashion designers. It didn’t need the instant community to be useful, yet the more community it had the better an experience for the user.

Having already built a community Frenzoo then transferred them into a virtual world, complete with 3D scenes. It wasn’t a cake walk, but they applied age-old techniques of product and community management to make it a success.

That woke us all up! So the first couple days after the launch we we dropped everything to concentrate on fine-tuning the camera, angle and lighting settings and get our avatars looking better again.

They know their audience, they’ve cultivated their community long before transferring them into a virtual world. It’s the same strategy Japanese CyberAgent took launching the incredibly successful Ameba Pigg.

It can’t be just about the technology

Compare Frenzoo to Google Lively, IMVU, and Metaplace. The product they launched day one was mostly cool technology and they expected the community to magically form around it. When I first jumped into Google Lively I could customize my avatar and set up my own scene. I guess the “product” was self expression through 3D maybe? Everything else involved interacting with other people – the community. It’s the chicken and egg problem again. Trying to form an instant community around technology turns out to be pretty difficult and leaves you with some interesting issues as Simon Newstead points out in analyzing Metaplace.

4/ Who was the audience?

This is an interesting one.  When I spent some time on the site I was struck how there seemed to be two distinct groups of users.  Those older, technically proficient game dev types who loved being able to tinker and create world.  And then a very young tween/young teen female set with “HoT ChiCs” clubs and looking for 14yo boyfriends.  It almost seemed to confirm the 2d avatars suited the young female crowd and the game APIs suited the game devs.

The end of Virtual Worlds 1.0, now onto 2.0

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Another Virtual World 1.0 is shutting down. This time Raph Koster’s Metaplace.com. This after vSide shut down earlier in the year and Google Lively last year. Playing off of Web2.0 I would group these and current worlds under virtual worlds 1.0. They’re similar to Infoseek, Excite, AOL, and Yahoo! – Web 1.0.

A few things defined Virtual Worlds 1.0:

  1. All about the technology – Classic problem of building a solution in search of a problem.
  2. Myth of self-expression – In search of a problem, many virtual worlds settled on self-expression as the problem they were trying to solve. Too bad no one was seriously hurting for tools to express themselves.
  3. Installs – Metaplace just used Flash but most had their own proprietary installs. No one like installs, especially the core audience most of these services were going after.
  4. Just 3D chat rooms – When self-expression fell flat and they found it difficult to compete with true casual games sites, these worlds were left with little more than 3D chat.

There are however Virtual Worlds 1.0 success stories. IMVU is incredibly succesful embracing it’s core functionality as just a 3D chat. Ameba has been a big hit in Japan by transitioning a community pre-built around blogs into a virtual world. And then there is always Second Life, probably the winner by default.

Virtual Worlds 2.0

As Web 2.0 rose out of the ashes of Web 1.0, virtual worlds will do the same.

Two things I believe will define Virtual Worlds 2.0:

  1. Built around 3D in the browser – Say hello to O3D and WebGL.
  2. 3D is for entertainment – Unlike what many believe, 3D isn’t exactly good for communication. What 3D is good for is entertainment.

Reminder that virtual worlds start with community not technology

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Many friends have asked me recently if I’ve seen Ameba? Apparently it’s a virtual world for older teenagers and young adults in Japan. Other than maybe it’s Japanese cute it isn’t much different from most virtual worlds, except it’s wildly popular. It’s thriving. But how can that be when virtual worlds, outside of MMOs and kid based worlds, are struggling? What’s different about Ameba?




Being Ameba is from Japan I wasn’t able to get much information going straight to the source. But it looks like any other consumer virtual world; you get your own virtual room, can dress up your avatar, even buy virtual goods. What’s so different? Then I learned a little about the history of Ameba, namely that Ameba started as a blogging community long before it started the virtual world piece.

I thought I would introduce Ameblo, the most popular blogging platform in Japan and talk about the culture and features surrounding Ameblo.

One thing my friends always mentioned about Ameba was how vibrant the community was, how whenever you were in world there were new and interesting people to talk with. That’s because they created that community long before adding 3D and the virtual world. Google Lively, like many virtual worlds, tried to create the technology first thinking that it was so cool people would rush to join. That strategy certainly didn’t work for Google Lively. Nor did it work for vSide. The technology doesn’t create the community however cool it is. It’s something we know in Silicon Valley but often forget – it’s not all about the technology.

Without context you might be a bit fleeting

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Rick van der Wal alerted me to the post What’s The Story? by Jessica Helfand. She discusses the millions of short (140 character) messages we’re seeing today on Twitter, status messages, and the like. Sometimes funny, these messages can also incite a story.

the wedding cake in the middle of the road

You can see a story, however it also void context – that’s all for you to add. Helfand seems to pine for a more traditional form of story.

Nevertheless, the pithy, out-of-context statement is becoming its own narrative form. Yet despite its appeal, it is almost singularly flawed: isn’t it by its very nature meant to perpetually self-destruct? (How else to make way for the next one-liner?) On one hand, it’s blessed with the patina of abstraction, a gestural cast-off intentionally divorced from context lest it appear too serious.

It’s value is fleeting. How many people remember tweets or funny status messages? For all their entertainment they’re fleeting. Which got me thinking. For years people have been advising the use of story to communicate, most importantly in businesses. We think in stories, so marketing and business should also. Seth Godin has been advising businesses to use story to break through today’s tidal wave of marketing messages. One problem is that they’ve been taking the advice but cling to the most basic form of story – the creation myth. Yahoo! being started by two graduate students from Stanford. eBay and the Pez dispenser myth. Companies are learning that they need to move beyond this most basic form of story. But beyond that these companies also default to stories with little context. Context takes time; the whole strategy of adding story is to maximize the little time you have with customers, why waste that precious time on context. Which leads me to ask, without context are they more fleeting?

Google Lively the perfect example of fleeting

Google Lively closedLet’s use Google Lively as an example. I harp on it and many consumer virtual worlds for a lack of context. You could modify your avatar to be a big headed kid, a bear, or almost anything. Compare that to World of Warcraft where you can be one of only a small set of characters and all taken from the established WoW universe. In Club Penguin you of course have to be a penguin. With SuperSecret you’re a teenager trying to grow up. These might not be the best examples but they have a whole lot more context than Google Lively had. Without context Google Lively proved very fleeting.

Google Lively unique visitors

Google Lively like others in the virtual world space thought they were building a utility and expected users to generate the content and in so doing, the context. They were very similar to the the pithy phrase – the wedding cake in the middle of the road. There was something there but it was fleeting without context.

Offering superior utility

That isn’t to say that they had to have context to survive, they could have provided superior utility. However compared to their competitors it was pretty much more of the same. Hence they were in the context game and sadly they weren’t even suited up to play.

In today’s world where everything is competing for attention if you don’t provide superior utility or context, you’re fleeting.

Design flaw – unrealistic avatars

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Although Google Lively has been gone for 3 months we can still use them as a design example. One mistake they made was all those creative and cute avatars. In addition to a stylish guy, you could be a big headed cat or pig. And why not, it’s a virtual world you can be anything. It gives users another way to express themselves. All sounds good right, but it turns out to be a bad design choice in general. Users like realistic looking avatars. More than that, some get offended when you masquerade as another gender. Why the offense? I have a few ideas.

  1. For all the hype about being anything you want in virtual worlds, it seems the majority of users see them as an extension to the real world.
  2. In the ends virtual worlds 1.0 are little more than 3D chat and the reason people chat is to meet other people. They don’t want to meet characters you’ve created, no matter how inventive.

Peter Edward, director of the PlayStation Home Platform Group, exalts the value of realistic avatars.

Peter Edward: One of the advantages is the realistic avatar. People can relate to it straight away. It gives you the opportunity to either create something that looks like you, or it looks like your alter ego or reflects your mood. It makes it more welcoming to people who may not want to get into the whole orcs and mages thing.

Giving users uniform avatars to start with also highlights any customizations they make and most likely helps community building as well. So if it’s just the realism people want, easy connection, or uniform palate – in general virtual world builders should go with realistic looking avatars. That is unless your world is contextually heave like Club Penguin.