The ROI of Social Media

You won’t succeed unless you’re holding all the cards

 

Today I’m going to go a bit off the beaten path and talk about something that isn’t virtual worlds related, though it very well could be applied to virtual worlds like Second Life if you really wanted to. Of course, by the title of this post, you might already get the idea that this post is going to be about that ultimate of intangibles – the ROI of social media.

 

 

 

Why is it intangible, you might ask?

 

Well, for a number of years I’ve listened to people like Gary Vaynerchuk give a brilliant summary of how social media is a different breed of animal in marketing, but he always brings up the concept of not knowing the ROI of a Piano as a reason for why we have to stop asking what the ROI of Social Media is. After all, how does one quantify those metrics?

 

We can easily qualify the metrics for impressions and reach, and indeed most marketing folks will wave those around like they are proof of their amazing social media strategy. Companies who hire them will see those jumps in impressions and reach thinking (erroneously) that their campaign must be getting the job done, and so they shell out more money to keep it going. Ultimately, it becomes a vicious cycle.

 

But there is a little known (apparently) method to quantify the engagement metric, and ultimately the ROI of Social Media. It’s something that quite a lot of marketing firms don’t talk about and this in and of itself is a bit disturbing to me.

 

Social media is an interesting case, because prior to it existing in the form we have today where it is a dynamic and engaging conversation, we essentially had impressions and reach as our only guide. This gave rise to the infamous SEO gurus who made a really good living (and still do) optimizing your search results and keywords, and producing tons of back links along with mountains of content to throw into the ecosystem as link-bait.

 

Of course, this was ultimately sabotaged when places like Google started favoring relevance and social search over search engine optimization alone. Now, instead of getting a top spot on a search engine based on your keywords or SEO tactics, you’re almost entirely at the mercy of the social interaction and the relevance of people.

 

Google will now show top results based on what other people in your sphere of social influence think, which means you no longer are optimizing for search engines but instead optimizing for humans.

 

This in and of itself is a game changer because no amount of keywords or content creation is going to translate into engagement. What matters now is whether what you are producing is relevant to the people you are targeting and whether they share and engage with it.

 

At this point it is safe to say that the old ways of doing things are right out the window, but a lot of marketers haven’t gotten the memo (or are kicking and screaming trying to hold on to their tried and true old ways).

 

I suppose this is also why there is such a fervor about Facebook marketing and posting best practices about Facebook, with a very biased lean on impressions and so-called reach. This is, after all, the bread and butter of the last generation of marketers in the scene and they are loathe to give it up.

 

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Social Media Poker

 

If content is King, then engagement is Queen... and let’s add into the mix context being your Jack. One card in your hand does not equal a Royal Flush, and in fact to have only one card is a losing hand.

 

There are a number of marketing firms worldwide that follow me in social media, and I’ve had the pleasure of engaging with most of them. When I recently put out the HEO metric equation, a handful of marketing places jumped on it because it’s that holy grail of social ROI.

 

It’s the thing they’ve been trying to quantify for years...

 

That being said, it’s also a disturbing metric that validates their fears as well but in the same light gives a lot of insight into trends that they’ve noticed all along but couldn’t really measure in anything tangible. This is why that popular thinking is on impressions and reach, while the engagement and social ROI is left more to unknown and mysticism.

 

But here we are in the age of social media and most of us completely suck at it, even the high paid marketing firms who are supposed to be wizards at it for their clients.

 

So let’s quantify the ROI of Social Media for a second...

 

SEO gets you the impressions and reach, but that’s only one part of the equation. relying on this alone is like showing up to the Indy 500 rolling a single tire and proclaiming that you’ve already won the race.

 

What we need is to figure out our engagement score. Which is to say, if content is king... engagement is queen.

 

Let’s say you are the New York Yankees, and as a brand on Google+ you have a brand page and plenty of posts. Your “Follows” for the brand are 748,037 which is your impressions/reach number. That’s how many people chose to hear about what you have to say.

 

We’ve already got the King down pat... but where’s the Queen in our hand?

 

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The Queen of Hearts

Do they love your content?

 

As of this moment in the equation, you’re reaching 748,037 people... or are you?

 

We know from traditional marketing that stuffing people’s mailboxes with junk mail constitutes “reach” and “impressions”. This is roughly where you are at right now if you’re riding on impressions and reach alone. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

 

Being a well known brand, you come with a pre-existing fan base, and so those people liked your brand well before you had a page, so it’s not a measurement of reach that counts here or impressions. That’s just the tire on the car.

 

So let’s look at the other numbers for a moment.

 

 

 

As Gary Vaynerchuk would say – Social is like a cocktail party. You walk into a crowd and you engage in conversation. You’re not on a stage blaring out a message to a silent audience, they are engaging and discussing things as well. If you wander into a cocktail party and start shouting over everyone or constantly try to steer the conversation back to you or make everything about you...

 

People generally think you’re self-centered and obnoxious.

 

If you’re the most popular person in the room and are generally great fun to be around, genuinely engaging and authentic... people will talk to you and also positively about you.

 

So let’s find out who is talking about and with you using the handy-dandy HEO Metric Score calculator.

 

 

The HEO Metric Score (Human Engagement Overview) is a simple equation and goes roughly like this:

 

Take the average number of “Likes” for your posts, average number of reshares, and average number of comments on your posts (discussion), add them together.

 

This is your base number.

 

You can add other numbers in there as well, if you want to get a completely accurate number based on extended engagement and ripples, but for now we’ll just deal with the brand page for a statistical sample which should be in the ballpark.

 

You can do this for every post you’ve ever made, or just take a random sample to get your average. Either way you’re likely to get roughly the same score depending on how much time you want to put into collecting that information. For this example I’m taking the quick n dirty route and going with median and calling it average.

 

Mostly because I can’t be bothered to run a full analysis to get numbers that would likely make the HEO lower than what I’d get if I were just going with the median... so I’m erring in favor of the brand.

 

Now, in the circumstance of the NY Yankees on Google+ we get roughly the following numbers for their brand page:

 

 

Average # of Likes (+1s): Between 50 and 500 on a good day. So let’s go down the middle and say 250 is a good average.

 

Average # of Reshares: Between 0 and 20, so we’ll go with 10 average.

 

Average # of Comments: The highest number I saw (off hand) was 66 and the lowest was 0, so down the middle again – 33.

 

 

Of course, these averages are just off the cuff and to get a full average we have to take into account total comments (etc) divided by total posts, but for this example we’re going to use rough ballpark estimates here.

 

This gives us 293 to begin.

 

So to calculate the engagement score, we divide that number by the total number of followers/impressions. In this case, 748,037.

 

That big number is your “reach” or impressions number... the one that so many marketers hail as the proof that their strategies are working miracles. But of that reach, who is engaging?

 

Who thinks what you have to say is actually important enough to share, like and discuss?

 

0.00039169185

 

If a score of 1 is 100% engagement and 0.1 is 10% and 0.01 is 1% then 0.00039 is about 4/1000th of a percent.

 

Ouch.

 

This is actually down since the last time I did the metric score for them a week ago when somebody who used to work for the New York Yankees asked me to calculate it. Last week they were at a solid 0.0004

 

So what changed from last week to this week?

 

Well, they gained more followers but remained stagnant on engagement, which lowered their effectiveness overall.

 

This works the same with Twitter and Facebook. High Followers/Impressions do not mean you’re always doing better and in a lot of cases it actually sabotages your engagement metrics.

 

What this HEO Score does is more or less validate the Quality over Quantity thinking and actually quantifies the ROI of Social – or as Gary Vaynerchuk would say “The ROI of Your Mom”.

 

Impressions are important still (reach) but we must take into account what happens after we reach those people if we want to get an accurate picture of our marketing campaigns.

 

After all, reach/impressions only account for inviting people to the party and may as well be akin to people who have driven by the party on their way to somewhere else or who may have heard about the party but didn’t stop by.

 

 

 

So we’re littering the Internet with flyers for our party but we seem to have nothing interesting to talk about or offer at that party when people show up.

 

Which more or less is an accurate picture of how social media marketing works today. Publish a bunch of content, put it out there, pay for impressions/reach and not pay attention to who is actually joining the discussion or sharing it.

 

One would think this is like missing the elephant in the room when it comes to social media...

 

Big numbers for your reach are important only in the context of how many of that number engage with you or your brand.

 

Otherwise, you may as well be telling your client to add a hit counter to their website and using it to justify the marketing. We realized long ago that the hit counter on websites had nothing to do with the bigger picture and wasn’t indicative of ROI... so I’m puzzled that today we point to essentially the same thing in social media and act like it’s different.

 

Impressions/reach is just the modern day hit counter on a website.

 

Let’s look at this another way for a moment...

 

It’s unreasonable to expect an HEO Score to be 100% but a measure to go by is that at roughly 10% you have enough to kick off a viral spread. So if your HEO Score is .0004 you are getting 4/1000th of a percent engagement. There are (of course) a ton of marketing “experts” that will tell you another story and how you can get 140 or 2000% engagement with their secret recipe... and they’ll tell you how when you buy their book or purchase their video seminar.

 

But in reality, you’re looking at initial impact and HEO. The rest are essentially echoes in the valley and amplifiers (reshares and ripples). The one thing you can control is that initial impact and try to get as close to 10% as possible for an HEO score in order to kick it over to double, triple, etc impact in ripples on social media (“going viral”).

 

The 10% rule is not something made up, but scientifically shown.

 

So let’s apply this to our HEO Score.

 

What will it take for something the New York Yankees posts on Google+ to effectively go “viral”? We have our number... and that would be 10% of their Reach.

 

Roughly 74,803 versus 283

 

So for the New York Yankees on Google+ to have near viral engagement, or reach that tipping point for “trending” they’d likely have to average 74,803 as an average engagement which would be indicative of 10% engagement across their social media presence.

 

They aren’t even breaking a half of a percent engagement right now, and instead are actually sliding backwards despite their impressions/reach.

 

Now, that doesn’t mean the New York Yankees are failing as a brand overall. It means they are liked as a brand but not seen as worth discussion or engagement in the social sphere. In short; Sure we like the Yankees (Go team!) but we’ve got more important stuff to talk about.

 

Like this cute cat picture.

 

 

 

Let’s talk a little bit more about that phenomenon for sliding backwards into the non-engagement trench for a moment.

 

In the bigger picture, if your HEO Score is in the hole, then adding a bunch of impressions/reach will only further dilute that number and actually make you look worse. See also: The New York Yankees

 

This can be dangerous because in social media, the internal metrics for relevancy and engagement are calculated automatically based on what each person actually engages with (those three numbers I gave you). If they aren’t sharing, liking, or commenting on your posts... those algorithms think your stuff isn’t important to them, and will begin pruning you out of their social feed until you no longer exist to them other than that initial “like”.

 

In a flood of information and posts, how did you think these social media companies were effectively tailoring each person’s stream to them?

 

Back to the bigger point: If you have a low HEO Score, and you are foolish enough to flood your brand page with impressions/reach, you have literally just wiped out a massive block of people who will likely never see your content again.

 

Effectively you are mass burning bridges, while also burning money.

 

Let’s run that HEO Metric against my own Google+ stats for a second -

 

Avg # Likes : 10

Avg # Comments: 10

Avg # Reshares: 15

 

Total Impressions/Reach (followers): 4,106

 

50/4,106 = 0.007 (%) HEO Score

 

Not super impressive, but fantastic compared to the New York Yankees at 4/1000th of a percent (0.0004). I’m just shy of 1% while the Yankees are barely breaking the silence at all. So I’m doing almost 1000 times better in the bigger picture – and that’s just on my personal page.

 

I’ll take 7/10th of a percent over 4/1000th of a percent any day.

 

 

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One Eyed Jack

Is it relevant to the situation?

 

The next question is always whether or not what you are posting in a particular context has any relevance to the situation. This is a bit of insight as to why the HEO Score is so poor, and needs to be analyzed and understood on a per-case basis.

 

For instance, we take into account your audience.

 

Are you on Google+ posting about your phenomenal Facebook Business Strategies?

 

If your HEO is in the can, and you’re doing this... then you have a problem with context of your content and refusing to understand your audience.

 

In the social media world, if people use Facebook – they likely don’t give a toss about Google+ strategies and if they are on Google+ then they likely aren’t interested in Facebook Strategies. What you will attract are other marketers who are preaching to the same choir.

 

If you’re not actually engaging natively with the audience in their own ecosystem, then you really have no idea what they are interested in, and so you aren’t posting anything that is relevant to them or compelling them to engage. See also: your HEO Score.

 

This is most obvious in the SEO and Facebook marketing scene showing up on Google+ to tell the people who aren’t using Facebook about how awesome Facebook is.

 

 

 

Know your audience.

 

You might as well be standing in a Burger King parking lot telling people about the new combos at McDonalds. This strategy doesn’t make you clever, it makes you look absolutely naive and desperate. Which is why your HEO Score is in the toilet.

 

Of course this works both ways as well... one wouldn’t justify spamming Google+ stuff on Facebook because it’s irrelevant to that audience.

 

But it’s cross-promotion!

 

I hear you say.

 

Authoring an article that applies to social media in general and then sharing it on multiple social media networks is cross-promotion. Writing an article about Facebook and promoting it on Google+ or vice versa is fishing.

 

For instance, the HEO Score can be applied to Facebook, Google+, Twitter and likely any social media aspect to get an estimate for engagement metrics and the impact of your actual reach and impressions.

 

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Ace in the Hole

 

After this very long post, you’re probably wondering what the Ace is in your metaphorical poker hand?

 

Content is King

Engagement is Queen

Relevance is Jack

 

Then the Ace is Authenticity.

 

And to round it all out – give your audience Ten Diamonds (reasons to like, share and discuss). If you can’t think of ten reasons why your audience would like, share and discuss what you’re about to post... then it’s time to rethink it.

 

Going forward, if you want to succeed in social media – remember the winning hand and don’t try to bluff.

 

Engage with your audience, and encourage them to engage with you. No single card is a winning hand... and there really is no way to bluff. Get involved and stop trying to pull cards out of your sleeves.

 

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Marketing Phoenix

The Age of Human Engagement Optimization

 

If you want to know what the ROI of #socialmedia is, you first have to understand the ROI of a Piano. If you don't know how to play the piano, that answer is zero. But if you're Elton John or Billy Joel, then that answer is substantial. The problem with social media (and especially those new to #GooglePlus) is that they are concentrating on customer acquisition but not level of engagement.

 

 

 

Essentially you're all acting like 19 year old dudes trying to close on the first move, which rarely works. This is why you see a lot of first generation social marketers coming into things like Google+ and failing miserably.

We're entering into an age where relevancy, context, and level of engagement all matter. If Content is King, then Engagement is the Queen. No longer do we live in an age where you can just produce a lot of content (or hire some firm to write it out for you) and expect high engagement levels or ROI. In this context, you have to change your strategy to address authenticity and engagement.

 

“If you don’t give a shit about people, you’re done” – Gary Vaynerchuk

You're looking for long term and not short term in this generation of social media. While the interactions tend to be shorter, the long-term engagement is getting longer. And then there are social engagements like Google+ that transcend just the conversation at hand and have a relevancy in everything a person does in countless contexts because it's being mapped to an identity.

Raw numbers are meaningless today. It's not the number of followers that you have which counts but how you engage with them and how many engage with you and your brand.

This is something I pointed out in 2010 when all of the social media marketers were still doing SEO (people still do that today?) instead of HEO.

 

SEO is essentially figuring out ways to game a search engine in order to boost popularity or visibility and hope the people you’ve duped into clicking through to your content will stick around and share it. Instead of appealing to people, you spent all of your effort trying to appeal to algorithms and computer search engines. And now with things like Google+ and how it ties into their search engine and other products, your SEO tactics will ultimately fail.

HEO is my term (I'm coining it now) for Human Engagement Optimization, and it refers to a total LOE (Level of Engagement) Metric. Because one lifelong customer acquisition is worth more than ten thousand "followers" who are as engaged as a pack of mindless zombies.

Let me put this into perspective:

 

One HEO result has ten thousand times the impact as your best SEO. It is a measurement and understanding of social media which says Quality over Quantity. In a world of unending bullshit flooding social media networks, you need to hit the home run the first time. You need to be genuine and engaging.

People remember you when you're catering to HEO, because they can put a face or personality to the brand, they can make the connection that lasts in their mind. And when they do that, they are more likely to recommend you to others in their social circles, who will (if you continue HEO) recommend to their friends. It's word of mouth on steroids.

 

“You cannot underestimate the sharpness of people’s BS radar – they can spot a soulless, bureaucratic tactic a million miles away.” – Gary Vaynerchuk

You don't need to be the loudest voice, and you don't need to reach the most people by your own effort through brute force. With HEO marketing, you just need to be compelling, genuine, and engaging. Your audience will build itself and amplify your voice.

 

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And that is where most marketing places these days are failing miserably. They come over to Google+ or some other social media service fresh and then just start spamming the hell out of it with their content, and no engagement. Closing the deal on the first post... or trying desperately.

Take +Applebees Tomsriver - which doesn't seem to know they even exist on Google+ (zero engagement and zero HEO), the main Applebees on social media itself and +Sears - go ahead and take a look at their pages and you'll see that their engagement levels are miserable and in most cases non-existent.

Perfect example of being a 19 year old dude trying to close on the first move. Then they wonder why Google+ or other social media isn't working for them, and so you see countless articles (usually from the HEO losers) whining and bashing Google+ for being a "ghost town" or just not worth it.

Well of course not! You suck at HEO, and SEO tricks don't work in an HEO social world. Real people see through your bullshit in a hurry and will call you on it in an instant. SEO is catering to automated algorithms and the last time I checked, this place is full of real human beings having conversations, talking about topics and sharing things with their friends and acquaintances that they find interesting.

 

So the simple fact of the matter is that since you aren't treating them like you care or find them interesting... they are treating you the same way, and so find yourself shouting into the Grand Canyon with only an echo and a tumbleweed to keep you company.

The video for this post is very enlightening, and I encourage anyone who is interested in #socialmediamarketing and #seomarketing  to watch it in full and take notes.

+Gary Vaynerchuk gets it right, and if there was anything you should listen to today, make it this guy. 

 

 

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The Rise of Google+

In a connected world, #socialmedia is just the beginning

 

 

 

Ever since the introduction of Google+ I’ve been watching the atmosphere surrounding it quite curiously. Up front, I’m going to state that I dramatically prefer Google+ over Facebook and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. This may sound like something you’d hear from an idiotic fanboy, but this isn’t about blind faith or anything like that – my allegiance is to the future, and by the end of this post, you just might feel the need to jump ship and not look back at the big blue again.

 

For now, let’s cover the basics: On the one side are the haters – people just hellbent on seeing Google+ fail and pretending like everything Google plugs it into is part of their failed strategy to make it into a successful social media platform, and then there are the people that drink the Google Kool-aide thinking it’s the best social media platform ever.

 

The problem with this all along is that both sides of the coin are dead wrong.

 

Facebook showed up to a thermonuclear arms race with a potato gun... let’s find out why.

 

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Google+ isn’t a social media platform

 

Let’s get this out of the way early in the discussion. Google+ was never meant to be a social media platform to compete with Facebook, and the irony is that Facebook was never in the same league as Google+ in overall scope. Both exist for very different reasons, of which Google will shine and Facebook will eventually crash and burn.

 

Don’t believe me?

 

Let’s take a look at what’s really going on then, and hopefully you’ll begin to understand the real point of Google+ in the bigger picture.

 

In order to properly frame the context, we need to start from the beginning, and that means it’s time to hop into the Wayback Machine with Mr Peabody and Sherman.

 

 

Coincidentally, Dreamworks is making a movie of this in 2014

 

 

In the beginning there was...

 

NIST: National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

 

 

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) envisions a cyber world – the Identity Ecosystem - that improves upon the passwords currently used to log-in online. It would include a vibrant marketplace that allows people to choose among multiple identity providers - both private and public - that would issue trusted credentials that prove identity.

 

For example, student Jane Smith could get a digital credential from her cell phone provider and another one from her university and use either of them to log-in to her bank, her e-mail, her social networking site, and so on, all without having to remember dozens of passwords. If she uses one of these credentials to log into her Web email, she could use only her pseudonym, "Jane573." If however she chose to use the credential to log-in to her bank she could prove that she is truly Jane Smith. People and institutions could have more trust online because all participating service providers will have agreed to consistent standards for identification, authentication, security, and privacy.

 

 

The point of NSTIC was to leverage an ecosystem of profile information that could be verified against multiple sources (and interactions) in order to reasonably ascertain a person’s trusted identity online. If you say you are Jane Smith, then the point of NSTIC is to have multiple trusted parties online vouch for you in order to strengthen the plausibility and create a reasonable assurance it was you.

 

NSTIC wasn’t going to do this itself, and that is also the point (if you read the website). Instead, the mandate falls upon online entities which collect and curate identifying information about you in order to create a sort of digital passport for your actions. At the time (and this is still true), there was no better way to do this than to set up a wonderful social media network and make it so popular that hundreds of millions of people will share all sorts of information about themselves, which in turn creates a “social profile” that can be reasonably verified for further interactions and relevance.

 

Facebook was likely the first into this foray with Facebook Connect and their SocialGraph implementations a few years back – and being the head of the pack for social media, they were an obvious forerunner to make this happen.

 

But something happened along the way that nobody expected.

 

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Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey Stuff...

 

 

 

Yes, I know... My mind is bigger on the inside.

 

 

Google realized that this whole trusted identity management thing was beneficial outside of the Internet and into a wholly connected life. The future is actually in an Internet of things, and those things need to know who you are. They, too, decided that the days of multiple logins and passwords were out the door and so unified their entire ecosystem under a single digital identity management dashboard known as Google+. They also realized that in a connected world, it’s pretty stupid to balkanize a slew of services and treat them separately since they all have a relevance to each other – for instance your Gmail Contacts work in Google+ and also Google Voice/Hangouts, which in turn are connected to your Android device, and so on and so forth.

 

Everything you do in their ecosystem is now tied to your NSTIC profile in Google+, which is a weighted and long-term profile passport. The more you use it and engage with it, the stronger that identity passport gets which in turn raises your relevance online, and therefore increases the “trust” in that identity.

 

This is roughly the point where Google+ and Facebook part ways in how this NSTIC is implemented and to what extent, because it is about here where Facebook no longer has the power to tread while Google will keep on trucking long into the (automated, post-scarcity, robotic) future.

 

Let’s compare...

 

Facebook is idle in the social media sphere, but using SocialGraph (Facebook Connect) you still are required to log into whatever apps 3rd parties offer within the Facebook ecosystem, as well as whatever 3rd parties across the world wide web implement the Facebook Connect login. This is a basic form of utilizing that NSTIC aspect, but that’s about the end of the road for Facebook.

 

On the other hand, the Google ecosystem is far more robust and so their NSTIC extends into nearly every part of your digital life and into real life as well.

 

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The following things use your Google+ identity

And this is just the tip of the iceberg...

 

Android Tablets/Phones – Google owns Motorola now, so they make their own tablets and phones, and some damned good ones at that. Sure you could use your smartphone or tablet without logging in, but your functionality may as well be crippled.

 

Google Chrome Browser – Arguably one of the best browsers for the web.

 

ChromeCast – Now it’s on your television.

 

ChromeBook – Google has their own laptops now, connected to Google Drive.

 

Google Wallet – Used to make purchases online or in real life via NFC on your tablet or phone.

 

Google Play – Now you know what Google Wallet is for online

 

 

When was the last time you saw a Facebook self-driving car?

 

 

Google Cars – It’s not a far fetch to think that Google intends on integrating its technology into self driving cars, and now your car can identify you properly. The car of the future doesn’t need keys in the ignition and quite frankly it probably doesn’t even need you to do anything but get in and go for the ride. Owning a self-driving car is in the near future as Google went ahead and lobbied for laws to be put into place in order to make them road legal.

 

Unless you don’t need to buy a car anymore because self-driving cars are more efficient and you really only need to get from point A to B reliably on demand, in which case your Android smartphone or tablet (when logged in) could call a car to you (because the phone/tablet knows where you are), debit your account (Google Wallet), and using Google Maps tell the car how to get there and back.

 

All as fast as you can say “Ok Google, Send a Car”

 

On your Google Glass AR headset.

 

And of course there is the Music, Books, and other media that are all available on Google Play for purchase and viewable on your laptop (maybe a Chromebook?) or an Android device linked to the Play Store, where you’ve logged in with your Google Account -

 

Which is to say - Google+

 

Then there is Youtube, and this one was a huge contention among longtime users of the service. But youtube isn’t an independent company any longer and is owned by Google as a service, so it makes absolute sense that it’s integrated with Google+ because comments and interaction are part of your NSTIC identity and social media interaction overall is how that identity gets strengthened or weakened to be more or less relevant in the bigger picture. The spam and abuse filters in the Youtube comments system are likely the same ones that were used and trained in Gmail – so while there was a sudden rush of spam and abuse comments in the beginning, all that did was accelerate the heuristic learning system to teach it what is good and bad.

 

And you really thought Google screwed up and didn’t expect the influx of spam and abuse, didn’t you? Wrong... they were betting on it, and they won.

 

There is, of course, Google Hangouts which is a free chatting and video call service that is also integrated with Google Voice. Free phone calls anywhere in the United States, and up to ten people in a video chat for free.

 

And then obviously there is Gmail which is also integrated into the ecosystem for email.

 

All of this is tied into and feeding your NSTIC passport. It’s all interconnected in digital life and real life over time. The more you use any service in the ecosystem the stronger or weaker you make your trusted identity, and the more you either increase or decrease your relevance to that system.

 

Want to be heard in a Youtube conversation in the comments? If you haven’t built up your NSTIC identity through Google+, which is to say logged in and used any of the services or provided information to it in order to reliably verify you and then taken the time to build your identity up reasonably through interaction, then your comments are considered anonymous and irrelevant. You go to the bottom of the pile.

 

Not to mention that Google Search itself is now based on Google+ and your social relevance among the ecosystem. The search results are now tailored to the individual based on relevance and your interactions across the whole ecosystem – so it weighs what your friends have to say higher than what a random company on the Internet trying to SEO their way into the results has to say.

 

 

If you squint really hard, you’ll see the pixel representing Facebook in the Google Universe

 

 

In order for Facebook to even be anywhere in the same universe as Google+ at this point, their ecosystem would have to include the following:

 

Facebook would have to have its own search and video service, so let’s say Microsoft bails them out and integrates Bing search and Video. They’d also have to offer voice service for free in the United States and give you your own phone number, then they’d have to convince Microsoft to let Skype have free video chat with groups while building an HTML5 integrated system into Facebook.

 

Facebook would also have to start making their own Facebook laptops, smartphones, and tablets while also offering Facebook Cloud Drive. And while we’re at it, they’d have to offer a free suite of collaboration tools that use that cloud drive such as Google Docs, etc uses for Google Drive. Again, maybe Facebook could convince Microsoft to make Live365 services free and integrate them into Facebook?

 

Then Facebook would also have to have their own Facebook Maps service, and then Facebook Cast to let it work on your HDTV and tie into the whole ecosystem under the single Facebook login. You would also have to convince Facebook to run their own Facebook Marketplace for every conceivable media type on the planet as well as apps market for the Facebook phones and tablets.

 

But the truth is... Facebook doesn’t really have any of that in the bigger picture, which is why they are cramming advertising into every inch of Facebook they can intrusively to make quarterly profits.

 

Google+ isn’t even remotely close to being the failure that people want to believe it is.

 

If anything, Google+ is doing what Facebook failed to achieve – a ubiquitous identity management system that extends across the Internet and real life under countless circumstances and scenarios, connecting every facet of your digital life together seamlessly – of which only one out of an increasing number of use cases for it looks like social media.

 

So in the future, it’s probably a good idea to manage your Google+ identity and engage with that ecosystem, since it’s going to become a very large part of your digital and real life going forward and across the board.

 

Or you can convince yourself that Facebook has a future and that Google isn’t running circles around them... but that would be kinda delusional at this point, because we’ve only just scraped the tip of the iceberg with the total ubiquity that Google is implementing.

 

In the bigger picture, Facebook never had a fighting chance.

 

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Ready to engage?

Share, Plus and Discuss.

 

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Anti-Social Media

Fixing your Social Media Faux Pas

 

There’s much ado about the death of SEO, or at least the shift from trying to convince a computer that your content is relevant and into the realm of social graph optimization.

 

 

 

 

SEO, or search engine optimization is a term used to describe all those little tricks marketers pull in order to make the content on a site seem more important than it actually is. For instance, you’ve probably seen these tactics already in an article that has been split up among multiple pages instead of a single read, or those picture galleries with a paragraph of text each page.

 

There also keywords in the meta-data, and having spam blogs where an army of writers are churning out link-bait content just to raise traffic arbitrarily.

 

I have a personal hatred of SEO, because it’s become synonymous with me to sleazy tactics to make noise on the Internet look like a signal. Let’s face it, most of that crap really is just noise and somewhere a website is benefitting from the fact that you clicked.

 

As luck would have it, the major search engines no longer give a damn about SEO because they’re switching over to what can be termed Social Graph Search. What that means is, the content on a site is deemed more relevant not because some search algorithm thinks it is but weights the decision heavily on social engagement and the organic opinions of the actual people the content is meant for.

 

This means that you are at the mercy of the community you were originally supposed to be creating content for, and if you act like a jerk or try to cheat them then they aren’t nearly as forgiving as an automated algorithm. In fact, social media is a harsh mistress at best but can definitely work in your favor if you know what you’re doing. There is definitely a very large margin for error here and even the best and biggest companies manage to royally screw it up – so don’t feel bad for reading this post.

 

In order to excel at SGO, (Social Graph Optimization), the trick is simply to be sincere and engage. This seems like common sense, but you’d be amazed at how often people and companies sabotage themselves by treating social media like traditional marketing outlets, or just plain being stupid.

 

In social media, it’s not just a matter of being ineffectual with your engagement, but it’s a long lasting and far reaching amount of damage that you can do to yourself, a personal brand identity, and ultimately an entire company if you go in acting like a jerk.

 

Here are the 5 things I’ve learned from being in marketing as a professional:

 

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1. Lateral Cross-Promotion is lazy.

 

Understanding the context of each social media outlet goes a long way to helping you understand what is and isn’t alright for cross promotion. For instance, Twitter is a good lateral cross promotion in different social media outlets (Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, etc) because there isn’t a lateral competitor. This is seen as an agnostic social media and likely wouldn’t cause detriment for cross promoting. However, Facebook and Google+ are lateral networks and so it would be a public sign of SEO ignorance to ask people on one network to leave it in order to check out a post on another.

 

This is most common among so-called SEO folks, and it’s insulting at best.

 

The point of social media is to engage a conversation in the medium you are addressing. If you have a Facebook brand page, it’s fine to ask people in Facebook to come check it out but completely arrogant and ignorant to wander into Google+ and ask people to check out and like your Facebook page.

 

The analogy is akin to wandering into the Apple Store and telling them to go check out the new version of Windows. Needless to say, this does nothing for your public perception and likely is detrimental. When you post something on a social network, you are soliciting conversation and engagement – but when your conversation topic is asking your followers to go to another network altogether to “like” you, the message you are saying is this:

 

“I have no intention of starting a conversation here, nor engaging. This post is wasting your time, and so am I. However, go check out my brand page elsewhere and do me a favor now that I’ve insulted your intelligence.”

 

 

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2. You have little control over the conversation.

 

You can shut down comments and treat your posts like a one-way street, but at the end of the day people are still talking with or without you in their own threads. When you refuse to engage in conversation, or attempt to dictate the message, you’re treating social media like a spam channel and telling your audience:

 

“The only thing that matters is what I have to say. I have no interest in your thoughts or opinions.”

 

Unfortunately, when you send that message what you end up with is bad word of mouth spreading like wildfire. Just as media can go “viral” there is such thing as “viral negativity” and it’s equally as damaging. Setting off this domino effect can bury a company image overnight, with months and maybe years invested to recover.

 

Instead of trying to get people to stop talking negatively about you or your brand, why not just give them something good to talk about instead? If you screwed up legitimately, then you need to own up to it and make amends. It’s that simple.

 

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3. The Social Media Universe does not revolve around you.

 

We’d all like social media to revolve around us, but it’s a community. Posting non-stop self-promotion posts, links to your blog articles, and asking stupid questions about your own products is disingenuous and (surprise) obnoxious.

 

Applebees posting about their new dish and then asking “What do you like best about our new dish?” is sleazy and disingenuous marketing. It’s nothing less than being an attention whore on social media, always trying to steer a conversation back to themselves. Nobody likes that asshole at the party who always tries to make everything about themselves, so why the hell would anyone tolerate that in social media?

 

Welcome to the community!

Now actually participate in it and show a genuine interest in your followers.

 

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4. Quality over Quantity

 

Pop quiz:

 

Which would you rather have? 1,000 followers who engage with you or 1,000,000 followers who are barely paying attention?

 

There is a mistaken assumption that social media is a numbers game and you have to treat your followers like Pokemon (Gotta Catch’em All!). A lot of places even go so far as to inflate their numbers by purchasing followers. The truth of the matter is, the true worth of social media is measured in quality of followers and not quantity.

 

If you’re a business, it’s about building a lifelong connection to your followers and thus turning them into devoted customers. If you’re a brand, then it’s about the same thing – or at least building a positive connection with those people which will last and pay off far more than had you just treated them as a disposable number to make a quick buck off of.

 

I’d always choose to have 1,000 highly engaged followers than 1,000,000 disengaged zombies. I enjoy the in-depth conversation that I have with many of them, and make it a point to tell each of them that I’m open for a chat if they feel so inclined.

 

If you’re a company, this is known as building brand loyalty. In my case, the “brand” is myself because we’re in the age of Brand Human. The only metric that truly matters is LOE (as I said in 2010) which is “Level of Engagement”.

 

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5. Your grandparents know more about social media than you do.

 

What you call social media today, your grandparents called common sense. The same rules they lived by in a community and in business, are the same rules that apply to social media. Back in the day when the butcher knew your name and the bartender knew your “usual”. Joe Rigby delivered you milk on Wednesdays, and you’ve been helping him out a bit since he and his wife have been having issues.

 

Fostering a long-term relationship with people, and a meaningful one, is what social media is about. Sincerity, honesty, and humility... pretty much the actual virtues that your grandparents were brought up with as “normal” we have seemed to have forgotten.

 

You don’t know Jack. In both the figurative and literal sense. But let me introduce you to Gary Vaynerchuk instead. You can learn a hell of a lot about social media from this guy, and I highly encourage you to take notes.

 

 

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Clothing Optional

Is it alright to say the Emperor has no clothes?

 

 

I seem to receive quite a lot of flack when I make it a point to state the obvious. Being a trend forecaster isn’t exactly the most rewarding job, since most of the time what you say is either wildly misinterpreted or causes people who have the most to lose from you being correct to turn their ire and scorn on you.

 

A lot of the time it’s just a thankless position to be in.

 

 

 

 

I’m not necessarily in a position where the point of being a synthetic environment S.M.E. is about recognition or praise, but instead it’s about trying to push an industry forward and break the stigma of failure that keeps repeating. That being said, you can only lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink. Even worse, a lot of times you’ll find that they’ll just rear up and kick you in the chest for trying.

 

So, too, we find a similar situation with a lot of things that I openly discuss. Whether it be about Second Life, HighFidelity, or other more mundane things like why avatars shouldn’t all be unrealistic proportions and heights.

 

In the case of Second Life, the Linden White-Wash campaign baffles me. It is fully in their right to insist on rose colored glasses and surrounding themselves with people who will gladly be in agreement with whatever they have to say, and of course it is in their right to surround themselves with only the people who will readily praise them.

 

But is that really beneficial in the end?

 

No, this is hardly the case.

 

When you read the articles online about Second Life, the negative aspects are what you read most often. Proponents of Second Life call that lazy journalism or that if they’d all just give it another chance they’d see how great it is. But the truth is somewhere in between what Linden Lab insists is reality and what the rest of the world outside of that rose tinted bubble says.

 

Keeping in mind that Linden Lab did throw pretty much everyone under the bus at one point or another leading up to today. Whether we’re talking about educational sims, opensim, third party developers, and even many companies that had a Second Life presence, Linden Lab leeched the hell out of all of them and then threw them all under the bus. Make no mistake, that’s what they seem to be doing best.

 

From a social media and marketing viewpoint, Linden Lab is doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing if they wanted to truly make things right and rebuild their credibility. Gary Vaynerchuk aid it best in 2011 (and ongoing) when he was talking with the brands he was representing, I believe Pepsi being one of them. There was a conversation about them having done something that was clearly despicable and it had turned into a social media backlash. When they asked Gary what they should do, he imply asked “Were you actually wrong?”

 

They replied “Yeah, but …”

 

There is no “Yeah but…” – “Were you actually wrong?”

 

See, the point Gary was making is that if you try to establish a PR bubble and whitewash the situation, you will actually do more damage to your reputation than good, because a majority of people will see through your bullshit and ignore your prepackaged reality to state things as they are, and not how you’d like them to be.

 

 

 

 

What is the benefit if you convince a few hundred people to constantly praise you if the rest who aren’t so prone to drinking the kool-aid are talking to the other 6 billion people on Earth? Even when it comes down to the JIRA, there is some serious white-washing going on and trying to bury the things that don’t coincide with their reality away from public eyes where it could make them look bad.

 

A perfect example of this is the difference between Mesh Deformer and Materials. Mesh Deformer was funded by the community, worked on and arguably completed long ago. Linden Lab locked down the JIRA in order to bury the things they didn’t want known publicly or to stifle that very type of community involvement – hence the whole Shared Experience and red-tape bullshit and hoop you have to jump through now just to get anything approved and done if you are dealing with Second Life. Before it was an organic evolution that left the best to be adopted in the whole, but Linden Lab was losing that game because they simply didn’t want to play nice. Their own viewer is not exactly one that people (given a choice) actually use, and so you saw how Linden Lab actively (and maliciously) started screwing everyone over.

 

Changes to the licensing that forced TPVs to play by Linden Lab’s rules and if they didn’t like it they could go scratch on the OpenSim grids. Implementing some sort of control channel that people who want to implement anything for a TPV viewer dealing with Second Life have to get some sort of approval from Linden Lab and (what amounts to) kissing their ass sufficiently.

 

Which brings us back to the difference between materials and mesh deformer.

 

Not to say that Materials aren’t nice (they are), but Mesh deformer is actually a solution to a widespread problem that has been paid for, worked on, and is (as far as anyone can really tell) ready to be implemented. But after maybe a year sitting in limbo with Linden Lab dragging their feet, treated like the black sheep bastard child they wish would just die and go away, it remains in the JIRA and unimplemented. In stark contrast, a new feature that doesn’t really fix anything gets expedited openly.

 

This is how the game is played now… either kiss their ass and do as they say, or you can’t participate. I don’t like how this works because it is wholly disingenuous and a corporate douchebag maneuver on their end any way you look at it.

 

So is it any wonder that trust is broken and the rest of the world has little good to say about Second Life?

 

Aside from the occasional PR fluff piece in order to (try to) make Linden Lab look good while sweeping the rest into the closet out of sight… one cannot readily blame the media for their negative perception of Second Life as the “They’re still around?” mentality. The only good press they seem to be getting in the real world (outside the rose tinted world) is the involvement with Oculus Rift which amounts to Linden Lab attempting to leech off of something else that is enjoying a bunch of hype in order to look cool again by comparison.

 

More or less that’s pretty much like hanging out with Macaulay Culkin right after he made Home Alone but before anyone realized he was hanging out at Neverland Ranch. It’s only hot until the hype bubble bursts and then nobody is really going to want to touch it with a twenty foot pole.

 

If there is any example of this asinine delusional thinking of PR, one only has to watch the Rod Humble “interview” with the Drax Files. I put interview in heavy quotes because from what I know, the questions were pre-submitted for Linden Lab to decide what they will and will not answer, and there was no room for anything that would deviate from what they were dictating would be the conversation. It was, for all intents and purposes, just a 5 minute promotional video dictated by Linden Lab ahead of time.

 

Now, if you want to talk about shoddy “journalism” – that’s what it looks like.

 

While I do enjoy what Drax is doing with his show, the Rod Humble interview wasn’t worth the time to be watched. It wasn’t a big deal, to be honest. Just PR fluff and a perpetual public relations bullshit piece that answered nothing other than how great they were and how everything is peachy. I’m kind of disappointed that Drax played along with that charade because the charade does more of a disservice than had he refused to interview Rod Humble unless he was open to questions that people *actually* wanted answers to.

 

That’s really what need to happen if you want this Fairy Tale to have a happy ending. You can fuel that charade all you want, but it doesn’t cover the real issues at hand nor does any of that actually get solved. So while the Second Life people who get attention from Linden Lab think they’re special… they aren’t. In the real world, where people aren’t catering to Linden Lab for favoritism, they tell it like it is because they are after the truth of the matter, not favoritism.

 

There is, of course, lazy journalism where they just copy the press release and call it a day – but you have to realize that they really don’t give a shit about Second Life anymore and any time they are put on to write about it, what they really want to write is

 

“Has-been company Linden Lab, (maker of Second Life), who threw nearly everyone under the bus or left them out to dry with a mountain of hype they couldn’t live up to, wants us all to pretend that never happened and write something flattering about them again.”

 

In the real world, Rod Humble doesn’t get to influence what is written about Linden Lab or Second Life. At least not to the totalitarian extent as they do with the bloggers and TPVs internally for that rose colored bubble they live in.

 

 

Which brings us back to the other point of what good is controlling maybe a thousand people going to do you if billion of people on Earth think otherwise?

 

Ergo, the Emperor has no clothes.

 

 

HighFidelity

 

Then we talk about HighFidelity, which is inevitable at this point. It’s actually a good thing I wasn’t at the Burn2 event where he was being interviewed because I would have (without hesitation) tore HighFidelity apart, and the line he was selling.

 

Does that make me a bad person? Not in the least. That doesn’t even make Philip a bad person, because I can separate the business hype bullshit from the person. It is no worse than somebody pointing out (again) that the Emperor has no clothes. It doesn’t matter how many people want to scorn me for it, or threaten to stop following me on social media, or how they’ll never read this blog again.

 

The Emperor still has no clothes. And here’s the picture to prove it.

 

It’s not an opinion, it is fact.

 

Right out of the gate, HighFidelity is stating a contradiction in plain sight on the website for what they plan to achieve. They believe voxel technology is the future (which is true), then explain that what they are doing will allow a high fidelity detailed virtual environment visible into the horizon using sparse voxel octree methods.

 

This is where we back the train up a moment because sparse voxel octree won’t do that – at least not to my knowledge nor most game industry knowledge. Why do you think there was such a huge fallout when Euclideon announced unlimited detail in software mode in 32 FPS on a laptop?

 

The underlying restriction is that sparse voxel octree is excellent when it comes to single objects, which is why it is awesome in medical imaging and widely used. But the underlying issue is when you start adding more and more unique objects to the scene, which is essentially what you are going to do when building a virtual world (duh)… then the memory and computation requirement starts skyrocketing.

 

There is one of two trade-offs you can have at that point:

 

1. Either you can reduce the fidelity of the rendered environment

 

2. Apply brute force computation (Super Computer)

 

Prior to Euclideon and the Unlimited Detail engine, point cloud data had to be pre-rendered for presentation up to a half hour or a few hours in advance, and when it came to real-time visualization it was severely limited or outright broken if you dealt with too much data.

 

Euclideon, despite the world screaming they are a hoax, went ahead and just made that a reality – a company named Aerometrex (a geospatial visualization company in Austrailia) partnered with Euclideon to use GeoVerse. Sitting around crying about how you or I cannot get our hands on a demo is petty and childish at best. The reason isn’t because the technology doesn’t exist (like a lot of people want to insist) but because you’re simply not worth their time to bother with.

 

 

Apparently a little less impossible than everyone thought

 

At the same time, when originally proven wrong that Euclideon didn’t have the engine to begin with and that what they were claiming was impossible, it makes little sense to then change your tune and say “Well, see? They released GeoVerse, but they’ll never release a game engine! It’s impossible!”

 

I’ve even seen a lot of talk about how GeoVerse was the goal all along and that Euclideon never was going to release a game engine from the start. Which I say to those people: Bullshit.

 

I know this is wrong, and that Euclideon is working on the game engine still, because I actually asked Bruce Dell and I’ve seen some of the preliminary work with that game engine.

 

Here was his reply as of April 16, 2013 in case you were wondering:

 

 

Hi Will

 

The answer to this question is that Euclideon is not just working with Geospatial industry.
We have been working really hard and we are making both a games engine that is heavily based on laser scanning, as well as a full game.

Regarding static visualization, we have always had the fall back position of Euclideon backgrounds with polygon characters, but we still choose not to use that fallback position and both our engine and game will be using unlimited detail based animated characters.

 

We feel that on the one hand we really are over due to release something for the games industry, on the other hand i think that when people see what it is we have been doing here they will feel its rather a big leap forward over what exists and I hope every one will feel it really was worth the wait.

Kindest Regards
Bruce Dell

 

 

It’s pretty obvious at this point that HighFidelity doesn’t have access to Euclideon’s Unlimited Detail engine because of how they are structuring things on their end. Back to the two tenants that give it away as listed above:

 

Either you lower the fidelity to compensate, or you brute force the computation with a super computer.

 

If he had something like Euclideon, then HighFidelity would require neither trade-off in order to reach photorealism to the horizon. This puts HighFidelity squarely into the realm of sparse voxel octree or an optimized variation at best.

 

Which brings us to why HighFidelity needs to use the Seti@Home distributed computing approach and why Philip thinks you should run your spare computer and bandwidth to process the world for him. With sparse voxel octree doing what he states it will be used for, he has no other choice but to throw a super computer at it.

 

Clearly he cannot afford a super computer, so the bright idea is to spin it in a way that seems like all of you will be altruistic and be his servers for him. It’s a pretty sweet deal when you think about it – no overhead of running servers, everyone else foots the bill and CPU load of a photorealistic voxel persistent universe.

 

The problem with this (aside from the absolute asinine assumptions) is that if there aren’t enough people to process everything, it is still going to severely degrade in appearance to compensate, or it is going to choke even a high end computer trying to keep up.

 

 

 

 

 

This is beside the point of all the asynchronous bandwidth you’ll be using and processing to “participate”. I think it’s pretty clear from the Skylight Viewer that Linden Lab tried (and failed at) that a large majority of users aren’t in a position to be chewing up that much bandwidth on a constant basis, and not as many people as he’s thinking actually have spare computers laying around just to process the world for HighFidelity.

 

But the underlying problem is simply that a lot of things were taken very very far out of context, and then applied to a business model with incomplete or willful ignorance of the subject at hand. The only reason he got away with it is because he’s Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life. It’s a case of reputation versus reality when it comes right down to it.

 

If there is any reason why that aggravates me, it’s because the entire industry is poised to pay (once again) for Philip’s snake-oil sale. If the industry already is in a world of hurt from the Second Life round, what do you think the damage will be if they all get thrown under the bus again with hype and false promises?

 

To add insult to injury, Google Ventures is one of their investors, as well as Linden Lab themselves (so you can take a wild guess what Linden Lab is thinking).

 

If you come from the research side of things, you look at a situation like this and think:

 

 

This guy… took many years of research and valid trend forecasts for technology, wildly misinterpreted it or willfully ignored the conclusions, and then told Google Ventures and Linden Lab that an entire industry worth of research from countless PhDs around the world are wrong, and successfully raised a few million dollars in capital out of the gate without so much as a prototype.

 

 

So is this just whining? Not at all – I’m pointing out the blatantly obvious problem with HighFidelity and how even the claim of a decentralized collaborative virtual world system not existing anywhere on Earth is a flat out fabrication.

 

I have the ~200MB worth of source code and research paper from INRIA that says otherwise, named Solipsis Decentralized Metaverse, sitting on my external hard drive.

 

Even better is the lecture I gave for Loyola Marymount University for Dr. Richard Gilbert and Dr. John Dionisio’s class where we specifically talked about a decentralized methodology to apply for a scalable Metaverse, and that turned into a topic as part of the published research paper in Association for Computing Machinery (which should be out in a few weeks).

 

Am I worried about it?

 

No, but that isn’t going to stop me from saying the Emperor still has no clothes.

 

Me, personally… I have nothing to worry about. I’m going to be highly amused and entertained watching this ship hit the iceberg.

 

 

 

 

When you need a super computer to run your new system… something is seriously wrong. I don’t care if Google Ventures and Linden Lab are throwing money at him, all the money in the world, and all the biggest names didn’t stop the Titanic from sinking, remember that. Don’t fault the guy for pointing out the damned iceberg.

 

History Lesson…

 

I find it interesting that whenever I make (what seems to me like) blatantly obvious observations about the current and future of a technology, and more often than not it comes true, I still to this day get people throwing some sort of hissy fit about it. Like I somehow stopped being right about things all of these years… which for a majority of the time I’ve been surprisingly on the nose about it all. It isn’t new to me to have somebody acting like I have no credibility (or even blatantly laughing and stating I don’t) only to watch them get damned quiet when they are forced to backtrack that sentiment later on.

 

ActiveWorlds is a classic case of this. In 2007 I left a list of things that company needed to do if they wanted to regain their ability to compete. After all manner of shitstorm and people declaring I had no credibility anymore, the company banned me from their forums and made a joke out of it.

 

The funny thing is -

 

From 2007 onward to today, they started actually implementing everything I told them they had to. Recently, they got to the “make citizenships free, and work off of microtransactions” recommendation, along the way implementing PhysX, and making other changes that were listed in the forum post I left for them while I worked at VR5 Online as their CTO.

 

The last thing on their list is to rebuild the ActiveWorlds engine using something updated like UnrealEngine or Unity. A modern engine for modern times.

 

The same thing happened to BlueMars when in the beginning I told them they were destined to fail for following the same model as Worlds Inc in the 90s. They again were typical in telling me I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about and they knew better.

 

Again, the same situation for Atari as what happened with ActiveWorlds, where they were left with a clear plan of action to avoid ruin and didn’t implement it until they got desperate and after the fact they scorned and laughed.

 

I said the same thing to Bruce at Avaya/webAlive during an IEEE meeting and he (predictably) told me I didn’t have any credibility. I had told him that Avaya/WebAlive was akin to the web VRML/X3D push in the 90s where everyone was saying (surprise!) VR is the Future of the Web! This is also why I don’t think Virtual Worlds Framework really has much of a future in that regard either, because we already have standards for 3D on the web but nobody uses them anymore.

 

If anyone was truly interested in 3D on the Web, they’d have made a WebGL version for X3D and VRML, extending it for modern graphics.

 

You don’t hear much from Bruce anymore about Avaya/WebAlive and for good reason. He realized I wasn’t bullshitting.

 

I have a long and extensive history in this industry for being able to call this stuff in advance, and very accurately. Yet, just as predictably, people are quick to tell me off or say I have no credibility when I make these predictions.

 

What people choose to believe and the truth have yet to be properly introduced.

 

This I why I have no love for Oculus Rift or even LeapMotion.

 

Oculus Rift is riding on a lot of hype, but at the end of the day it will revitalize the VR industry in the same way as every other virtual reality headset from the 1990s onward to today. How many of you own a VFX Headset?

 

The answer is close to zero.

 

 

 

 

Oculus Rift will enjoy the same success and adoption rate as the VFX 3D Headset. It’s not going to reignite the virtual reality industry or save it. It’ll enjoy some hype for awhile, and it’ll be just what it really is – A Fad.

 

I give the same designation to Leap Motion technology. The first thing that came to mind was the CueCat scanner back in the turn of the century. Nobody owns one today, and to wit – technology exists that makes Leap Motion obsolete before they even get out of the gate, using your exiting wi-fi router to give you gesture control all over the house. But even in a limited fashion, there isn’t going to be a wide adoption rate for Leap Motion because the same people who would use it for gesture based control would also opt for a touch screen tablet.

 

And I’ll even give it the benefit through the whole idea of 3D space… it is an inefficient way to work for hours on end, holding your hands and arm out like that versus at rest on a mouse or keyboard.

 

It just doesn’t have a long term use. If you’ve ever held your arms out for more than fifteen minutes, this would have been blatantly obvious already.

 

 

Choice of Reality

 

I get all kinds of flack for this stuff on a constant basis, but what irks me most is when people base their contention on things I actually didn’t say. It’s one thing to be pissed off for something I did say (even if you’re still wrong), but too many spend their time lately having an attitude for things they entirely invented that I said.

 

Even worse is when they have to prop that up with denying I said things that I actually did say!

 

Some people just have a warped sense of reality, and choose to believe things they make up in their head.

 

Not for nothing, but I’m not interested in arguing against your imagination. To be perfectly honest, I don’t even care if people follow me on Google+, Twitter, or Facbook. It’s a mild suggestion at best, and it’s there if you feel like it.

 

I’m writing this stuff as an honest assessment from my years of experience and from the vantage point of having an excellent track record for being correct. I’m not sugar coating things, or drinking kool-aid just to make people happy. I’m just stating things as they are regardless if people like it or not.

 

 

What am I doing about HighFidelity?

 

I’ve had this question asked one too many times lately, so I’ll answer below before I lay this insanity to rest:

 

I’m going to let that ship slam into the iceberg, and if I’m lucky most of you will be on board when it does. Maybe then somebody will get the point.

 

That isn’t to say they aren’t doing some interesting research, or that some of it will be applicable to future systems. It’s just to say that it doesn’t really matter if they’re serving lobster on the Titanic or not.

 

In the meantime, I guess the old saying applies:

 

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

 

Contrary to popular belief (sorry Nebadon Izumi) I’m not just sitting around and “whining”. There’s this pesky thing called an NDA which says I am legally not allowed to disclose what I’m working on (and have been for the past year). That tends to happen when you’re involved with Lockheed Martin, et al.

 

But if you’ve been paying attention to anything in this blog since the beginning, you wouldn’t have to ask what I’m working on… now would you? At the very least, what was said here over the years precedes the NDAs I’m bound to.

 

 

 

 

 

Figure it out, Sherlock.

 

And if this blog disappears entirely, you know why.