Retention and the Learning Curve

Two recurring problems that Linden Labs faces with users of Second Life are retention and the learning curve. And, of course, these two problems are not unrelated.

I don't have up to the minute figures handy, but the last time I did the analysis, the percentage of accounts that logged in during the last 30 days was in the single digits. This is not good news for Second Life. It means, on the face of it, that of the millions of people who have tried it, only a few hundred thousand have found it worth while to continue on a regular basis.

There are some mitigating factors to consider, although they don't mitigate much. First, a lot of people create an account just so they can say that they checked out Second Life even though they may have had no intention of staying. Second, most die hard Second Life residents have multiple accounts, called alts. Some will create an alt, use it for a while, and then create a new one to have a fresh start. So, the number of accounts does not reflect the number of real and active users.

The number batted around for Second Life accounts which is in the 15 million range is not a hard number for active users. If I had to guess, (and this is only a guess), I would put the number of warm bodies at the keyboard closer to 3 million with only a few hundred thousand warm bodies logging in on a regular basis. At some point I will analyze the numbers again and try to provide some better data. However, I don't think these guesses are too far off.

Why is this amazing technology so under utilized? And why is the retention rate so poor? Well, there are a number of answers to those question but the one I started this post with is the learning curve. Others include the lack of structure and the failure of most people to realize the potential of this technology. But, I can only take on a piece of this at a time.

Linden Labs has tried several attempts to address the learning curve problem by developing multiple varieties of Orientation Island. However, these efforts are all misguided. It is like saying "People don't seem to like my mulligan stew. So, I tried mulligan stew with oregano. Then I tried mulligan stew with cumin. Then I tried mulligan stew with curry. Nothing seems to work." Maybe the problem is that you don't know how to make mulligan stew.

As I have said before, I think Linden Labs should take a page from the playbook of video game designers and develop quests. I think quest based learning is one possible solution to both the learning curve and retention problems. I am beginning to develop some learning quests at Cosmos Academy and I will explain it further in the next post.

Virtual Meetings in Second Life

I have been talking about the creative and artistic potential of Second Life in recent posts. Now, to talk about using Second Life for meetings, I seem to be going from the sublime to the profane. And I apologize for that. But, if this technology is going to see its potential, it has to begin with some basic but important applications. Don't forget that the earlier adopters of the web did not see it as a commercial environment. And it wasn't until all the dot coms started showing up that the web started becoming a technological force to be reckoned with.

We can safely and fairly divide people into two groups with regard to virtual meetings. Group One feels that you can have virtual meetings in Second Life today so there is no need to consider meetings as a special application. Group Two is unwilling to log into Second Life because they find it bewildering. And there in lies the problem. The functionality needed to attract Group Two is considered too trivial to think about by Group One. But we are going to think about it nonetheless.

What kinds of thing would you have to do in order have a successful meeting in Second Life? Well, first of all you would need to get people to the meeting. One way to do this would be to have default accounts for people to log into that would automatically place them at the meeting. Another way is to have a feature that would automatically offer a teleport to the meeting to an avatar when it logs in. A third possibility would be to set the avatar's home to the meeting location. And a forth possibility would be to develop a meeting object, say a lapel button for the avatar to wear, that would automatically teleport it to the meeting when touched. Now, let's stop and think about this for a minute. People from Group One might say that this functionality could easily be developed. And that may very well be true. But somebody who wants to hold a meeting in Second Life does not want to have to develop it just to have a meeting. They want it to be available already and they want it to be easy to use. So, Group One already has a lot of work to do in order to attract Group Two.

Assume that a Group Two person managed to get their avatar to the meeting location. What next? Well, depending on the person they may want to go directly to the meeting. They may want to look around and get used to the virtual environment. They may want to pick up meeting materials. Or they may wish to pick out some clothes for their avatar. Again, Group Two people would probably say that everybody already knows how to do those things. But that is not true. The Group One people, who make up the vast, vast majority of potential Second Life users, have no idea.

Let's just consider the problem of finding new clothes for one's avatar in preparation for the meeting. In order to find clothes, one has to search for clothing places; they have to teleport to a store; and they have to buy a set of clothes. In order to buy the clothes they have to have money. When they buy the clothes, they usually get an object that needs to be dragged to the ground and opened. Frequently, they cannot do that at the store and need to go to a sandbox. Once they drag the container to the ground and have it rezz, they need to it and copy the items to inventory. Then they drag the items to their avatar. If dressing in real life where this difficult, most people would just walk around naked.

Instead, imagine a room with a row of pictures on the wall showing various outfits. A person can click on an outfit and have it immediately put on their avatar. If they don't like it, they can press a reset button or try on another one. If they like it, they can give it a name and put it on again later by simply typing in a command like "/wear gray suit" in open chat. The point here is to make the Second Life environment easy enough for a normal person to use. Normal people are not excited by the possibilities of Second Life. They just want to go to their meeting as painlessly as possible. And it is the snorts of derision from Group One people that are keeping the Group Two people out and keeping Second Life from fulfilling its potential. If the computer were kept in the hands of Group One people, it would still be computing missile trajectories and I would not be writing this blog.

Next time we will consider functionality to make the meeting go more smoothly and after than we will consider some fundamental changes that would need to take place in the base technology to support these kinds of applications.

Video in Primative Cultures

I think I have an analogy that can provide some perspective on the problems that Second Life is having in getting traction. First consider all the ways in which we use video. It is hard to get your arms around all the uses. We use video for entertainment. We sell products via commercials. We inform people through news programs. We educate people through educational programs and train them with training programs. We use video to document events and to explore possibilities. In fact, the uses of video in today's culture are virtually endless.

Next imagine showing up at a village in the Amazon rain forest with video equipment trying to introduce the villagers to video technology. You give them cameras and take some video of villagers. They are all impress and every body wants to be in front of the camera. However, when it is their turn to do something, they are not quite as enthusiastic. They like it when you shoot the video but when it is their turn they cannot think of what to shoot. They are not really sure what they can shoot. They are not really sure what this technology is good for. "Everything," you say, "it is good for everything. The possibilities are endless." They might even agree that the possibilities are endless but still cannot come up with anything that they may want to do. So, you leave the village frustrated.

I think this analogy is apt because introducing virtual world technology in the early part of the 21th century is a lot like introducing video equipment to primitive villagers. There are a lot of Ooo's and Ahh's but few really grasp what can be done. And moreover, by thinking this analogy through a little further, I think we can see what needs to be done in virtual worlds to overcome this problem.

Let's say our visitor to the Amazon village had to get them to adopt video technology. Let's say they were working on a UN technology transfer grant or for some eccentric philanthropist just to make it believable. How would they get the villagers to accept video technology? Well, doing demos and talking about endless possibilities is probably not the way. This is way too ethereal and way to difficult to grasp.

What would make sense would be to select a single very concrete application to demonstrate the value of video. You might record the chief's speeches to the villages for historical value. You might record wedding ceremonies for their social value. You might record young hunters learning how to hunt for its educational value. It would probably be difficult to select one thing, but that is what you would have to do. Pick one thing and show how video is useful in that one case. Once people became more familiar with video they could see other uses. But, initially they would need a very concrete example.

I think the same could be said for virtual world technology in general and Second Life in particular. There are way too many possibilities and people need a concrete example. I think the uses that I discussed in the previous post for using Second Life for personal development are still not concrete enough. They are very compelling but probably not the place to start. I think the place to begin is with a very mundane, very concrete application. Perhaps something like using Second Life for virtual meetings. This application is as promising as it is boring. And I will take it up next.

Linden Labs and the Failure to Understand Their Customers

Sometimes it is difficult to figure out who your customers really are. Universities, for example, will often have vigorous debates over whether their customers are their students, their donors, the employers who hire their students, or the society in which they function that needs educated citizens; just to name a few possibilities. Consider the following two perspectives: 1) Our students are our customers. They pay tuition and receive education in return; or 2) Our students are a raw material that goes into our final product which is an educated person. Our customer is society. Just how different would universities operate under those two scenarios. As it turns out, most universities do not resolve the customer issue. Diversity and richness are far more important to universities than efficiency and effectiveness. And education is so fundamentally important to society that we cannot walk away from these institutions no matter how unfocused or inefficient they may be. But a business such as Linden Labs with a product such as Second Life cannot afford the unfocused approach that a university takes. Their product is not fundamentally important to society. People can walk away. And they do.

Just who is the customer for Second Life? Let's lay out a few possibilities and see how each possibility would have different needs and demand different responses from Linden Labs. Consider the following possibilities: 1) The customer in Second Life is the Basic Account holder; 2) The customer in Second Life is the land owner or business owner; 3) The customer in Second Life is the real life business who wishes to sell their product or service through a virtual world; or 4) The customer in Second Life is the corporate research and development group who is using Second Life to develop new ideas and new products. This list is not intended to be exhaustive. It is only intended to show how these stakeholders have very different needs. Let's consider each in turn.

1) The customer in Second Life is the Basic Account holder: We can dismiss this one from the start. Basic accounts are free accounts which do not yield any direct revenue to Linden Labs. They may yield indirect revenue if advertisers are will to pay based on traffic or if Second Life businesses make money off of them. But, in those cases, the customer is the advertiser or the Second Life business. So free basic accounts are, at best, a means to some other end, although that other end is not entirely clear.

2) The customer in Second Life is the land owner or business owner: This is a possibility. Linden Labs earns revenue by selling and taxing virtual land. If this is the customer then LL would want to provide services to support Second Life businesses and would want to attract high quality residents who are likely to spend money at these virtual businesses. Neither of these goals is met particularly well. While Second Life businesses can down load spreadsheets of their business transactions, that is pretty much it for customer support. Issues like security, performance and reliability, all of which are critical to Second Life business is wanting. Further, the basic account policy in conjunction with anonymity tends to attract low quality traffic thus limiting the revenue potential of the businesses. The basic account policy is like going to a homeless shelter to generate traffic for your shopping mall.

3) The customer in Second Life is the real life business who wishes to sell their product or service through a virtual world: In the previous scenario the customer was a Second Life business. In this scenario the customer is a real life business looking to sell products through a virtual world presence. You can think of this as having an island as an alternative to a web site. While this scenario has promise there are three major flaws. First, as sited above, the basic account policy tends to generate low quality traffic. So revenue potentials are limited. Second, the learning curve for Second Life is very high and customers who are used to the ease of using the web are not going to switch very readily if shopping in Second Life requires a big investment of time in learning how to get around. Third, the Linden economy works well for a fantasy environment; but only for a fantasy environment. Paying L$250 ($1 real money) for an item of clothing encourages one to dress up their avatar and enjoy the fantasy. However, an inexpensive book in a Second Life store would cost L$5000 while a computer would cost L$250,000 and a car would cost L$5,000,000. This scale benefits inexpensive products like virtual clothing but prohibits sales of more expensive real world items.

4) The customer in Second Life is the corporate research and development group who is using Second Life to develop new ideas and new products: This is another, and very different, possibility. These developers would be attempting to use Second Life technology for distance education, business meetings, virtual conferences, virtual tourism, and so on. These are all very promising ideas. However, if this were the customer, then LL would be investing a great deal more in infrastructure, development tools, performance, reliability, training, consulting and so on. And perhaps they are. But, if they are, it is a well kept secret.

The point here is that you cannot be all things to all people. Different potential customer groups have different needs which are often at odds with each other. If you try to satisfy all of them, you land up not satisfying any of them. In order for a business like Second Life to be successful in the long term, they have to figure out who their customers are and make sure that they are keeping those customer happy.

Creating Your Second Life - Part I

The single most impressive feature of Second Life is the capabilities that it provides the user to create their own content within the virtual world. Philosophers of technology claim that technology can always be viewed, in some way, as an extension of the person. In the case of Second Life technology, it can be viewed as a technological extension of the imagination. This is no small claim and the thing that Linden Labs did get right was the power that they put in the hands of their users to create their own worlds in Second Life.

This power to create is referred to as 'building' in Second Life. The user begins by creating a primitive object, called a 'prim' and then by modifying the shape, location of the prim and the images displayed on that prim, all of the content that you see in Second Life is created. There are some minor exceptions to this rather sweeping statement. For example, land is modified through a different editor in a process known as terraforming. And avatar looks are modified in an 'Appearance Editor' which will be discussed in the next post. But, for the most part, the vast majority of what you see in Second Life was created through building.

Building in Second Life is far from perfect. Its major drawback is that it is difficult to learn. All of the in-world tutorials are basically the same. The few available books are basically color glossy repeats of the in-world tutorials. And the in-world classes focus on how to achieve a specific result rather than on understanding building so that you can figure out how to achieve that result on your own. However, my experience with out-of-world graphics editors isn't a great deal better. So, I will give them a pass on that. If you want to learn how to build; you can. It may not be as easy as it could or should be. But any person of moderate intelligence and persistence can learn. And once you learn, what you can do is astonishing. So let's focus on that instead.

People with active imaginations are always picturing things in their minds. In fact, the definition of imagination is to be able to picture something in your mind that was not directly derived from experience. You can picture a unicorn in your mind, for example, even though you have never actually seen a unicorn. The beauty of building in Second Life is that if you can imagine it, you can probably build it. So instead of relying on those fuzzy pictures in your head, you can actually see what your ideas look like when represented in a virtual world. The net result of this is that your imagination and creativity come alive. In the classic movie - The Wizard of Oz - the film switches from black and white to technicolor when Dorothy leaves Kansas and enters the Land of Oz. The analogy is apt. Entering Second Life is like entering the magical World of Oz. It is a realm of the imagination, a place where all things are possible. If you can see it in your head, you can see it on the screen. And, if this were all that building in Second Life allowed you to do, it would be impressive enough. But it is not all.

When you create something in Second Life it is out there for everyone to see. So instead of those pictures being in your head, they are out there in a shared virtual world. You can display the products of your imagination and see the products of other people's imaginations. It reminds me of an old Bob Dylan song called Talkin' World War III Blues in which he says "I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours." This is the essence of Second Life - "I'll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours." The ability of users to get the content of their imaginations into the virtual world for others to see and the ability to see the content of the imaginations of others is truly the strength and most impressive accomplishment of Second Life. And the importance of this capability cannot be overstated.

That bears repeating. The importance of this capability cannot be overstated. And if I say anymore, I will only diminish it. So, I will end with that remark.

How Do You Learn in Second Life

In the last post, I stated that the most serious problem for Second Life with regard to retention was the lack of structured activities. I suggested that quests might be a way for people to structure their time while getting familiar with the environment. Following on the retention theme, I think the second most serious problem in Second Life with regard to retention is the learning curve. People show up in this virtual world and are swamped by the number of things they don't know. Granted the Orientation Islands attempt to address this but they fall way short of what is needed to keep people engaged. I guess the people at Linden Labs had to learn all this stuff the hard way and feel that new visitors should learn the hard way as well.

Second Life is a lot like a 3rd world country. If you know the right people and you know the right questions to ask, you can get things done. But, if you don't spend endless hours making contacts, or hanging out at Welcome Areas waiting for tidbits of information to be dropped, your chances of making any progress are very low. For example, if you happen to be hanging out on Help Island when there is a greifer attack and a knowledgeable mentor handy, you might learn that you can suppress the particles by simultaneously pressing ctrl-alt-shift-=. I think it is fair to say that the SL interface is not intuitive.

What they need to do is to organize the things you need to know into categories and develop usable tutorials in each of those categories. I know there are people who would say that there are tutorials on building and scripting. There is even a place where you can learn about particle generators. However, if you really believe those tutorials are adequate then I can only assume that you know absolutely nothing about either education nor normal people.