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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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.

White Noise

Will the real Metaverse please stand up? #SecondLife

 

Over the years I've continually heard how many different virtual environments are "a Metaverse" or (shudders) "the Metaverse". Recently I read the question "Is Minecraft the Metaverse?" on a random blog post somewhere.

 

From my point of view, this is a train of thought that makes me twitch every time I hear it. While I understand that virtual world participants have the best intentions, I have to admit that their notions of "Metaverse" are woefully misguided at best.

The Metaverse is a singular construct much in the same manner as The Internet or the World Wide Web. I cringe whenever I hear people refer to different virtual worlds as "a Metaverse" or "The Metaverse" because it reads/sounds to me in the same manner as if one were to say many things are many Internets. We don't state the Internet in plural form, nor should anyone state the Metaverse in plurality.

 

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Cyberpunk History

I get my notion of the Metaverse from many sources, but most importantly the genre which spawned it overall. To this end, we're talking about Cyberpunk culture.

The construct of a Metaverse within this genre was varied but held a common theme altogether. In the book Neuromancer by William Gibson, it was a matrix - an endless sort of digital void with blue grid lines extending forever. Things were constructed on this grid at varying points and complexity, programs ran on this grid, etc. Then came Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which for all intents and purposes is the cited inspiration for most virtual environments in the industry - at least if we look at systems like ActiveWorlds or Second Life.

In this same genre also existed systems like you would see in Shadowrun, and this is one of my favorite descriptions for a Metaverse construct. There were things like nodes, virtual FTP systems - a three dimensional free-space with ICE security and more.

 

 

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Shadowrun on Sega Genesis | Hope you brought a decent deck, chummer

 

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What I see in The Metaverse, a real one anyway, is not a singular construct but a contextual and decentralized construct which defines an overall system. While Neal Stephenson may have eloquently described The Street in Snow Crash, I believe that in a true Metaverse, The Street was simply a main gateway world (possibly the oldest and most popular). That being said, I don't believe the entire Metaverse was The Street. It wouldn't make any sense to assert that if we put it into context with its predecessors - The World Wide Web & Internet.

However large or popular a singular destination on the Internet is, no single destination comprises the entire Internet. When we put it into context with the genre of Cyberpunk, and not just a singular destination view of a particular novel, we see that the Metaverse is just a 3D Internet.

Existing in The Metaverse were many gateways of entry, many destinations, and many contexts, but they shared a common protocol and standard. In this context, then, places such as Second Life consist of similarly The Street context, but then other destinations in the Metaverse existed such as (in context) Open Simulator, and related spinoff systems utilizing similar variations. We also would say that maybe destinations such as Kaneva, There, and (at least minimally) Blue Mars were destinations in the overall Metaverse but not a single one was the Metaverse itself.

 

I have to momentarily pause and mention that even in The Street context, Second Life fails miserably. In order to have The Street, a virtual environment must be a contiguous virtual land mass which is traversable in circumference. As in, I could start walking from the entry and eventually travel around the virtual world to return to my starting point.

 

Google Earth I suppose lets you pull that off, at least the contiguous sphere of a planet, and with Sketchup I suppose you could place rudimentary models. However, that being said, Google Earth is a Paraverse at best. Minecraft, then gets a second look because it almost comes close to meeting the requirements. However, it’s a single destination among many possible destinations, and no manner by which to seamlessly traverse them all under a passport – yet.

 

I give Minecraft the “yet” because you do have a singular login, and with that login you can join many servers. So the passport is rudimentary implemented, and the planet twice the size of Earth is there as well, but I couldn’t walk around the virtual world and return to where I began. I couldn’t seamlessly transport from one space to another, and (to wit) the concurrency rate of any of these systems is still miserable. Even after all of this, I’d still dismiss Minecraft simply because it isn’t able to talk to any other system but its own.

The problem with virtual worlds and virtual reality is that there seems to be no clear differentiation as to what constitutes them - except in the minds of futurists like myself who make such distinctions and state merely:

 

 

 

The Metaverse is a decentralized construct of three dimensional virtual environments whereby the environments themselves are the product of the end-users which inhabit such spaces. Each virtual space may behave differently or be controlled by differing interests, but they share a standard methodology of ubiquitous access. Within these multiple contexts exists ubiquity of access and interoperability whereby a single means of access can traverse all spaces within the connected Metaverse.

 

 

To put it into better light, we continue to compare the Metaverse to the World Wide Web.
When you are online using the World Wide Web, you have a web browser program which follows standard protocols for communication and rendering the content. HTML5, PHP, Javascript, WebGL, and more. For proprietary functionality these web browsers accept "Plugins" which the end-user may install as they see fit much like modules installed on a Shadowrun Deck. No single website on the web constitutes the entire world wide web, and looking at the situation in the proper perspective, we obviously would think it's absolutely asinine to state a single website is the entire web.

Now you understand my frustration with the semantics of The Metaverse terminology and usage today. These virtual environments are destinations in a possible Metaverse in the same manner as Google and Yahoo are websites on the web.

 

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I state possible Metaverse because to this day nobody is talking to each other in a standardized fashion, and that bothers me for different reasons. For now, what we have is decidedly not a Metaverse but a lot of proprietary stand-alone virtual worlds. I hate to burst people's bubbles, but there is no Metaverse.

The distinction between Metaverse and Video Game is also fairly straight forward, in that a video game differentiation is a matter of contextual insight. World of Warcraft is not a Metaverse enabled system because the virtual environment itself is a closed construct whereby the participants are interacting on a linear model. The environment and media is predefined, with only the variation of interaction within that predefined space being the dynamic aspect. In the Metaverse - the context itself is open to interpretation by the participants, as well as the very construct itself which begins with a totally blank slate.

 

Therein is the major reason that Minecraft is not a Metaverse, let alone the Metaverse. By definition what you may create within the construct of Minecraft is limited by the recipes which are predefined. I’m sure you can build things there, but you are severely limited still compared to a virtual environment such a Second Life wherein you have LSL and Mono scripting. I call that a definite step up, but not quite total freedom.

 

 

As far as reaching for a true Metaverse designation, Linden Lab would first have to understand that the idea of “Shared Experience” is absolute bullshit. If you want to define yourself as the Metaverse, or at least the first major construct within the Metaverse, and set a precedent for others to join on, you have to take a hard look at the Web Browser itself. There is an underlying “shared experience” that is HTML5, much in the same manner that Second Life would have assets. After that, it’s up in the air as to how the end-user experience plays out. Plenty of customization options and contextual modifications make no two experiences totally the same – and in the Metaverse those plugins are the same as slots used on your deck, or third party additions which fundamentally change your viewer to add or remove features even if those changes differentiate the “shared experience”.

This differentiation is very important to understand because it's a metaphorical context understanding, and it is the underlying definition which drives social media altogether. A gaming context is predefined, and the experience is set up for you like an interactive choose your own adventure novel. There is a linear flow to the experience, and it is a controlled manner. In the Metaverse, there are no options other than to say that the participants are expected to define their own experience in totality. The company which controls the destination does not (or should not) be defining the in-world experience, but instead the participants should be.

 

If we look at Linden Lab policies, you can begin to understand that whenever that rule is broken when dealing with a Metaverse context, there is backlash for obvious reasons. When we really think about it, the Metaverse is a 3D Social Media outlet of experience. This however doesn’t insinuate that trying to redefine the rules of social ecosystem is a good idea – which is why the social media integration aspect of Second Life has largely failed. Not because integrating social media like Twitter, Facebook, etc into Second Life is a bad idea, but because the particular methodology and thinking behind that implementation particularly was poorly thought out and is a prime example of otherwise intelligent people acting incredibly stupid.

 

Twitter provides the platform, the participants provide the flood of content and experience for the ecosystem. Social media in general works like this as well, and it’s only when the service provider company decides to personally meddle in that ecosystem that the proverbial shit hits the fan. Hands-down, this has been the case time and again for Linden Lab, Active Worlds, and every company which started as a sandbox environment and later decided to start stepping on toes in their own ecosystem or other ecosystems by offering the same content options that their own participants where already handling. It’s sabotage at best.

 

 

Metaverse Checklist

 

I’m going to rattle off some prerequisites that should be met prior to anyone describing anything as The Metaverse or a construct within The Metaverse, just to set the record straight.

 

 

Decentralized

 

There is no central server for assets, or specifically for authentication. A virtual world within The Metaverse is akin to setting up a web server. Certain spaces may be gateways, but overall they are not the choking point of control no more than any single destination online in the world wide web would constitute a singular entry into the online world. Authentication may be centralized for your “passport” or you may have multiple “passports” which can be used within the virtual environment altogether. So when you log into the Metaverse, your credentials are universal across all participating constructs. The assets themselves also are decentralized, meaning no single datacenter houses them, and in fact the participants themselves are part of that asset storage and retrieval system.

 

 

Contextual Experience

 

A singular viewer which is extensible through third parties, and provides a standardized basis for interaction only, while additional functionality can be “plugged in” at the user’s discretion. In short the experience is modular and the interface is minimalistic by default. Just like I can access FTP, HTTP, etc through a web browser, and plugins by third parties extend the functionality for my web browser, and third parties are free to build their own web browsers with whatever abilities they choose – so would a Metaverse Viewer achieve. One viewer, modular, extensible, and very capable to meet the needs of many.

 

 

Standardized Protocols

 

They should all be a collective construct. Not just Second Life and OpenSim, but every virtual environment that wishes to call themselves “Metaverse Compliant” should be talking the same language and together be considered a contiguous space.

 

 

Concurrency

 

The centralized server methodology for glass ceiling concurrency is not acceptable. Lessons Learned from LucasFilm’s Habitat eloquently defines this issue and states the solution since 1991. It is an absolute travesty that not a single company in twenty years has actually implemented it, and more so that their concurrency issues directly stem from that blatant ignorance of the subject.

 

Dynamic Content Creation/Consumption

 

There are no preset goals, no predefined recipes. You are given a toolset and encouraged to define all aspects of your virtual world from the ground up. The experience is asynchronous and fluid, with little if anything to hinder this ecosystem. Even the viewer/program is up for interpretation by the ecosystem – with only some base definitions of standards to work from in order to maintain a minimal expectation of ubiquity. In this context “shared experience” is far too broad of a term to invoke.

 

There is no such thing as a producer or consumer in this ecosystem, but instead only the new social media breed known as Prosumers.

 

 

Epilogue | Final Thoughts

 

 

That’s not to say the Metaverse will never exist. Far from it, actually. What we’re seeing today are the beginnings of that Metaverse construct forming, gaining ground, and experiencing growing pains through every phase in this evolution.

 

I understand that the population really wants to see the Metaverse, and they are at least partially right for identifying at least the base components of what will make up the actual Metaverse when it exists. That being said, we must not confuse the sum of the parts for the whole.

 

Systems like Second Life, ActiveWorlds, Kaneva, There, and even (possibly) Minecraft are merely individual parts of a greater whole that is the eventual Metaverse. They are one of many modes of context, experience and immersion in a sea of many which are interconnected under a single ubiquitous access and protocol of interoperability.

 

Since that doesn’t exist yet, it is safe to say there is no Metaverse – but we’ve at least begun to correctly identify what will comprise it when somebody decides to actually go ahead and build it.

 

What we have today is simply the inkling of the many things that the Metaverse ultimately would be, but spread out among countless systems and never all in one spot. What the Metaverse would be, is all of those things in one program, wherein the “companies” provide service access points and facilitate content creation under the premise that each company is a “Burbclave” in the digital world. No single entity has yet to put the puzzle together, and such far I have seen only many years of companies snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The program would be built as a modular expansion system inherently, the interface would be minimalistic and intuitive, contextual for everything. The Metaverse will seamlessly integrate into your real life as well through Augmented Reality, creating a hybrid of the two and blurring the lines between real and virtual.

 

The Metaverse will be many things to many people, but what it is not is what we have today.

 

 

Y.T. (Yours Truly) Picture courtesy of

Shelby Rasmuson in Second Life

 

 

 

 

I thought today’s post deserved a soundtrack :)

Brand Human

Identity in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing

 

Something we need to be aware of is that the bigger issue of social media overall is simply that when given the ability to freely share our lives, we are quick to share our lives. That may sound like an oxymoron or counter-intuitive as a statement, but it means in the digital world we have a bad habit of over sharing.

Remember, a social graph is literally designed to infer who you are at all levels through your interactions, preferences and relationships. The more you share, the more you should care - since companies like Google, Facebook, etc wind up knowing more about you than you may ever realize, and more than you may even know about yourself through relational inference.

 

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Digital Identification

National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

If you've never heard about this initiative, you really should read up on it (link below). Essentially it's a government initiative to further online identity and secure interaction through participation of third party private sector efforts.

In short, think of it like a manner by which to identify a person online reasonably. The solution to make that happen is a trusted social graph which strengthens as you use it, and eventually can become verified by the third party (or collaborating third parties), creating a trusted identity online for situations when an elevated level of trust is required.

The best way to accomplish that, then, is to implement systems like Google Plus, Facebook, etc wherein your "social graph" creates that unique online identity and eventually gets verified. Compelling people to use these systems isn't exactly hard, either. Just add a dose of gameification element to it all and viola!

People click "Like" or "+1" on stuff and build their social graph all over the Internet, which in turn strengthens their "trusted identity". The problem is that, while you are compelled to share with your friends online all those details about yourself, there is a third party that is also looking in on you and your friends - namely Google, Facebook, etc which in turn has an open channel to the NSA, CIA and Department of Homeland Security who are privy to the raw information you are submitting.

It's a double edged sword, and we need to keep it in mind as we go bravely (or stupidly) into the future.

The Real Issue

For now it's all fine and well that we're getting all of these online services for "free" and sites are integrating the social graph into their own systems for authentication, etc... It is not uncommon to see sites these days that encourage you to log-in using Twitter, Facebook, etc as a one click step. Ease of use makes it really compelling, but in the long run you are giving up just a bit more than you realize through doing so.

The price you pay for these services is not measured because you are paying with a currency that is completely invaluable - which is to say, namely yourself. As +Gary Vaynerchuk says - Brand Human is the most underrated brand there is. The most important brand in the future and today is not Nike, Coca-Cola, or Pringles - it's you.

As you use those social graphs to log into other sites, you are adding those sites to your social graph as part of your "online identity system". It's still a double edged sword but one that can easily be abused by third parties and government if not careful.

For instance, I'm sure being branded a terrorist for clicking "Like" on #Occupy streams or sites seems far fetched, but if you're not careful that's exactly what happens in your social graph. The same could be said about people who show a public interest in things like #Anonymous or whatever other non-sanctioned and fringe outlets exist such as #Wikileaks or #BradleyManning

What's more, the further these services become collective, the more likely there is a single choking point for access online. Sure, you could just use another service, but as they start implementing social graph log-in methods over their own, those sites become part of the Google and Facebook extension as well, even if they are run by parties outside of Google and Facebook. So if Google and Facebook decide to shut off access to your account and services - those sites outside of them shut down your access as well by default.

Even more interesting is the implementation of cloud storage and applications into this ecosystem, whereby you are perpetually renting access to your own data and the programs that allow you to manipulate it. We see this with Tablets recently, whereby the on-board storage is myopic by default and the App-stores compel you to rent cloud storage to offload your files to. Google already does this with Google Drive, giving you a preset "entry" storage account and then setting “reasonable” rental prices for more.

As computing moves in that direction, I get a little nervous at the implications. Do something a third party doesn't like or disagrees with, and in a single request you're essentially cut off from anything meaningful online as a result, losing a majority of your data as well.

Email, videos, documents, social media, calendar, pictures, music, blogs, and (over time) the rest of the useful Internet itself that uses those social graphs to let you log in.

Something to mull over in our race to ubiquitous computing.

 

 

External Links

 

National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace
http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/ns_tic.pdf

Image by:

Ragaru | deviantArt - http://ragaru.deviantart.com/art/Cyber-Eye-111574083

 

Who Ya Gonna Call? Ghost Writers!

Linden Lab looks for guest bloggers, finds laughter instead. #SecondLife

 

Are you a passionate Second Life resident who loves to write about your Second Life experience and are looking for exposure for your own existing blog? Looking for a way to connect with other bloggers and open your door to new Second Life community readers?  If so, you might want to submit an original blog post (no links please) to us and it could end up being featured in the Second Life Community blogs.

As the movers, shakers, and experts on everything Second Life, we’d like to invite you to submit your original blog articles to us at blog-call@lindenlab.com with the Subject Line: Guest Blog Submission.  Selected submissions will be posted to the Blog section of the Community as a featured guest post!

 

 

Dear Linden Lab – My laptop in-world sucks less than yours. I’m actually blogging from it.

 

If you’ve been paying attention, Linden Lab recently put out a call for guest posts from the prominent bloggers in the community, and as much as I’d love to give them kudos for trying, I have to concede that the response they received from the community was expected.

 

It’s about ecosystem and the community of sharing, and on this point Linden Lab dropped the ball very publicly. We live in a world of content creation and sharing, and we take pride in our blogs because these blogs represent our freedom of expression and ideas on not just the virtual world but also all the things that go with it. We’re the Digerati because we’ve been so diligent in building our own brand and avatar presence, not because we’ve been busy building it for somebody else. That’s the lesson about Second Life – It’s not about Linden Lab, it’s about us, and every time Linden Lab acts selfish in this regard the community calls them on it.

 

This isn’t to be mean spirited, either… it’s just the way it is in this media-as-commodity society and prosumer culture. I’ll post a video at the end of this for you (and for Linden Lab) to thoroughly explain what the hell is going on, and how they (and you) can benefit going forward.

 

It wasn’t so much the offer from Linden Lab that made me laugh, but the guidelines and constraints they set for submissions -

 

If you would like to submit a guest post for the Second Life Blog, please consider these guidelines. Only submissions that meet these criteria will be considered for publishing.

 

• All selected posts must adhere to our Community Participation Guidelines.
• All selected posts should support the inclusiveness of the Second Life community.
• Selected posts must not include marketing-related links and must not be entirely self-promotional.
• The post may include links to your website and blog in a brief author’s bio (approximately 3 sentences), which will be published at the end of the guest post.
• Please limit the number of images included in your submission to 4 or less.
• We reserve the right to review and edit. We regularly edit posts by our contributors and guest bloggers.
• Guest posts must be original and may not have been published elsewhere online already.  

 

I’ve put the offending terms in bold for which I would believe the most astute of bloggers who would be of any interest in this co-op posting would disagree with. We’re capable of editing our own content, and aside from minor edits, I’m not comfortable with a third party reconfiguring what I have said behind closed doors to suit their own needs. More importantly, the last requirement flat out misses the point of the sharing atmosphere and community which it is soliciting responses from – in that you are being asked to write content, without compensation of any kind, that Linden Lab can freely edit and manipulate as they see fit, and to top it all off, they demand that the content you are writing is exclusive to them alone.

 

This would exclude simultaneously posting the same article on your own blog, and to wit, makes you little more than a ghost writer for a company that is looking for free SEO content to fill their blog roll.

 

Like many blogs, this blog carries a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported license (or a variation of Creative Commons). This means you are free to repost my blog posts in full or in part anywhere you would like, as long as you give me attribution and as long as you aren’t charging people to read it or making money on it. This does not mean I endorse you, your blog or magazine, or anything you say. It simply means you are free to share what I’m saying here with little restriction. The choice of license does not necessarily exclude commercial use of my work, but it does require that you seek written permission from me to have that constraint waived.

 

In stark contrast, Linden Lab is immediately shooting themselves in the foot by demanding the exclusivity of submitted articles, which is a direct violation of what many established bloggers adhere by. In the event that exclusivity is required, the next logical question from any blogger is going to be –

 

What’s in it for me? I mean… why should I write for you?

 

For this question, Linden Lab gives no substantial answer other than they assert promotion of your own blog, which to me sounds a lot like the website client that says they’ll pay you for making them look good by putting a little by-line on the bottom of the page to promote you.

 

No self-respecting website designer would agree to those terms, and no self-respecting blogger of any merit would agree to those terms either.

 

The bigger issue with all of this is that the very idea of exclusivity and tight constraints in a digital media ecosystem is a direct contradiction to the ecosystem itself – in a world of sharing, Linden Lab is asking for permission only to take and gives nothing back, and by association alone are showing that they are thinking like a traditional company that simply does not understand social media.

 

Despite all of this, however, I’d like to offer a better solution for everyone – far be it that I should be the Debbie Downer for Linden Lab’s hopes of building an army of bloggers willing to write stuff for them with little or no incentive.

 

Instead of asking for bloggers to submit content specifically for Linden Lab to publish exclusively, if they were truly interested in celebrating the diversity of culture and opinion in their community, they would instead be asking for their community of bloggers to be submitting posts from their own blogs to be reposted on the Linden blog in a celebration and expose’ of their community and wide reach. Any editing that is done to those submissions should be done in a transparent manner with the actual writer, because the writers themselves are the creative force behind what is being said on those posts – what they are saying is very deliberate and intentional.

 

For those of you into social media (and that’s probably quite a lot of you) the following video from Gary Vaynerchuk should be highly interesting and informative. This video should also be considered homework for the people at Linden Lab to take notes on.

 

 

 

It’s time to learn what a prosumer is all about–this is worth every single minute of watching it. Trust me.

 

 

 

Seriously… I wasn’t joking before. This isn’t a mockup. It’s my actual laptop in Second Life, on a desk that I made myself, and running a fully functional Cloud OS through Shared Media.

 

 

 

 

I wasn’t kidding when I said my laptop in Second Life is better than the one that Linden Lab used for their screen shot. Unlike their laptop, mine actually has a cloud operating system on it with a full suite of actual applications. Let’s just say I happen to like using Shared media to the absolute fullest potential.