How To Make Second Life Truly Mass Market, Part 1: Deep Integration With Facebook

The latest official economic stats for Second Life are now available, and they tell a mixed picture: while user-to-user transactions continue to grow, the absolute number of unique users does not. After a steady growth period at the start of the year, monthly unique repeat SL users have plateaued to around 750K. In his report, Linden Chief Product Officer T. Linden suggests this flat growth is the result of the new policy (imposed last May) banning Traffic-gaming bots.

That may well be the case, but what's undeniable is that Secnd Life is still struggling to become a virtual world with mass market status. By way of comparison, consider today's largest virtual world: YoVille, from Zynga, a web-based MMO played in Facebook and MySpace. Only launched in May 2008, it now counts nearly 20 Million unique monthly active users on Facebook alone. (Making it much larger than not just World of Warcraft, but web-based MMOs like Habbo.)

There are a number of reasons for YoVille's rapid and sustained growth, but one in particular stands out: Deep integration with leading social networks, especially Facebook with its 300 million active users. This explains how YoVille managed to grow so speedily, for its appeal is not just the virtual world itself (cartoonish and simple as it is), but the desire to play it with Facebook friends. "At their most fundamental level," Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, recently told me, social network-based games like YoVille "are games that you can play with real people with real identities."

I recently wrote about how mass adoption is so crucial to Second Life, and at the time, I promised to offer suggestions for making that possible. Taking YoVille's success as a reference point, my first recommendation is this: Second Life needs deep integration with Facebook.

I don't mean a mere SL-related Facebook Application (those exist already), but integration across all channels, starting with the very first SL signup page, which should accept Facebook account credentials.

Doing this would associate new Residents with their Facebook page, which generally contain many of their real life details. In that way, the subsequent SL avatar would have a subordinate status, after the owners' real name and autobiographical details. (As with my YoVille avatar friends, at left, who are automatically linked to their Facebook profiles.)

Philip Linden often says that someday, Internet users will feel obligated to use an online avatar that's somehow distinct from the actual owner. However, with the largest virtual world (and other leading social games) the exact opposite is the case: the most popular avatar types are explicit extensions of an already existing real world identity.

Or to put it another way: to gain mass growth, Second Life may have to abandon the expectation that new users adopt a whole separate personality. As YoVille and other top social games (which now count 100 million+ users) suggest, most people prefer avatars that are firmly linked to their first lives.

Comments

[DrFran Babcock]

SL will never be popular with big business as long as 60 avatars crash the sim. Another model is needed for scaling. When I read Snow Crash I marveled at the numbers of avatars huddled together.

[Peter Stindberg]

Are we talking about the same Facebook that does officially not allow avatars as users and has been known to suspend those accounts?

This is called SECOND life, and many people take the "second" literal and create a second existance, often not linked to their RL personas.

[Ioki]

I hate face book, I don't want sl to be anything to do with Facebook. I believe SL could do with perhaps creating two sides to SL,

one just devoted to the social aspect which can be about connecting to groups, social networks, and shopping

Second the creative content side for those who wonna make things happen for those social shopping types.

The viewer should be able to change to accomodate the sort of user you are.
1. The browser config that is real simple, only the option you need to socialise and shop. This simplified user experience can then be implimented in web browsers?

2. The pro user browser config with all creative options.

We see this kind of thing in other companys like apple, adobe.

2.

[Henri Morlaye]

Facebook and web integration is so obviously mandatory for mass market adoption of virtual worlds. SL walled garden goes straight in the wall. At A WORLD FOR US we are right now creating a good web and facebook embeddable web 3D solution with http://www.assemblive.com . Still in beta stage though but we definitely want to solve the problem of companies stuck in SL but willing to explore immersive 3D and social networks convergence.

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Peter, while I like the creative freedom of SL as it now exists, maybe we old folks just don't "get" 18-22 year olds.

90% of the time, my students want avatars that reflect their appearance as closely as possible IRL.

I suspect that the Millennial Generation, characterized by demographers as questing for "authenticity" and, in my experience, "creeped out" by those who conceal their RL identities, would flock to a VW where the vast majority of avatars would be richly linked to who they are IRL.

They have been drilled into believing and repeating "the sad creep in mom's basement" meme.

My students have not, in any of my SL-assisted classes, put RL info into their SL profiles. They understand that while they have no privacy, they do have power over disclosure. And they don't disclose much in a world w/o security as to who they are encountering.

I'll ask about YoVille today in class.

[AnnOtooleInSL]

So this is Klingdon's next big idea Hamlet?
Is this why Amanda is trying to shovel real life identity exposure onto SL? Because facebook doesn't allow pen names?

Newsflash: Yoville is already there duh. LMAO

Yes the regions have to be returned to supporting 100 avatars. So LL needs to start chopping out all that lag inducing crap they added that no customers asked for. And LL needs to scale SL and begin marketing it for entertainment purposes. As for "Nebraska" LL should have spun off a separate company/division for that and let it grow on it's own. SL is about entertainment. Trying to change SL into a meeting room is a fatal error.

[Metacam Oh]

All my friends, family, etc on Facebook are having a great time playing boring stuff like Yoville and Farmville when a greater world exists. Create the portal and they will come.

[Deltango Vale]

Hermes, Rolex and YSL are not interested in the mass market. Perhaps Linden Lab should focus on quality instead of quantity.

[Tymmerie Thorne]

What Deltango Vale said!! Times 100,000,000!!!

[Giulio Prisco]

I just tried Yoville, unbelievably boring.

I wish to see options for much deeper integration between SL and the 2D Web. Facebook, Linkedin... and, of course, Google Wave, which imo is where a lot of action is going to be. Wave is developer-friendly, and there are already groups of SLers on Wave.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I think Facebook integration would be okay. The whole secret identity thing is a headache, but maybe some negotiation with Facebook would permit anonymous avatar pages (anonymous to other users; I think Linden Labs should have RL names and addresses for every resident).

The bigger issue I see is the disparate system requirements. Facebook will run on just about anything that can connect to the web. The same is true of most of their cheesy apps. SL, on the other hand... not so much.

Which means we'd get a big influx of people logging on, experiencing 3 fps, and deciding that SL is the pits before they ever make it to the Graphics Options screen.

[Lalo Telling]

I begin to surmise why Philip resigned: disgust.

Mass market = lowest common denominator.

Do we really want Second Life to degrade itself from the "National Geographic" of virtual worlds to yet another supermarket-checkout pop-culture rag?

[JeanRicard Broek]

To facilitate integration with web 2.0 & Facebook I would first propose that LL's new "2.0 Viewer be open source (I am afraid it may not be) & support both browser functionality and 3D windows in one common program. This combo viewer/browser design is unlike now, were everyone thinks you can only fit a viewer into a browser via a browser plugin or place the browser into a 3D viewer by way of HTML on a prim or a separate popup window as we currently have.

Imagine Chrome or Firefox having full browser code and SL viewer code in one single download, separate but in one app. Imagine the basic browser interface. By opening a new tab, you could be in a web page, open a second tab and you can be in 3D space(SL or OpenSim for example) open 3, 4 tabs as many as you want.

Imagine cut and paste. Imagine a rich sidebar placed like Google reader but instead it is a frame for plugin widgets/apps, sized like cellphone apps, linkable to the open main window for inventory, chat, avatar profiles etc.

Imagine the battle of which is better 2D or 3D ending. Imagine both living & working together as equal partners, each with their own strengths. Maybe then we can bridge the divide between facebook and SL.

The technologies are all here already, the core components of this simple framework are all in production & the code is all open source.

For more detail see my post and the suggestion made to the realXtend GUI team here: http://jeanricardbroek-architect.blogspot.com/2009/10/proposed-new-open-viewer-platform.html

[Thynka Little]

Many Facebook friends have suggested that they would like Farmville recreated in Second Life.

[Pyewacket Bellman]

How about the Google model? Don't worry about making money for the investors until the product is ready for prime time.

Another thing - Facebook. "It's a cookbook." You've been warned.

[Camille Serpentine]

Again your comparison of figures is skewed.
Your user graph is monthly for just Jan-Sept2009 and your previous entry about user to user $transactions was quarterly for Q1 2006 to Q2 2009.

A better comparison would be all the users from 2006 to 2009 with the user to user $transaction data of the same period.

It is hard to take you seriously when you don't use statistics correctly.

[Mr Potato Head]

Making SL appealing to Facebook users would be a good move. It's just questionable whether the SL viewer could be made light enough to run smoothly on a weak laptop and still be appealing.

Facebook users have very weak computers. And many of the users are likely to be using hand held devices in the future, so their machines are going to be getting even weaker.

Still, Facebook is definitely a crowd that's worth trying to appeal to. I'm all for less anonymity and role play in SL.

[Opensource Obscure]

I'm glad that Linden Lab didn't build Second Life's future upon other services's success.

YEAH TODAY EVERYBODY USES FACEBOOK. But what if in 12-18 months another service (or a combination of services) puts Facebook out of the game, like Facebook previously did with MySpace?

[Tristin M]

Second life has gone from leading.. to following not a step in the right direction at all.

[Vax Sirnah]

I think you are on the right track here, but I actually think that the idea is not expansive enough. Second Life needs to be able to plug into social media of all forms. We should be able to easily create and consume tweets, RSS feeds, blogs, Google Wave, etc. while in world. Conversely, things out in the cloud should be able to easily contact avatars/objects in world. That means robust APIs for SL-Net communication.

Part of the problem is that SL is an island. It's an immersive environment - it's supposed to block out the rest of the world. But the world isn't moving towards that - they are moving towards co-existence in several virtual environments (people have the web, IM, twitter, facebook, etc all open at the same time). SL needs to break out of that and become a part of the landscape. Possibly by providing client-end integration for a lot of this (you can already log into IRC from Emerald. Why not AIM?). Maybe just have a tabbed interface like someone above suggested. Or expand the HUD capabilities of the clients so that you can make HUDs that talk to the client directly and call the web directly.

Or maybe work on getting other services to inetgrate SL features - like being able to Digg places in world, or post SLURLs directly to Delicious or Facebook.

The enterprise end of SL is fine and dandy, but it's the personal use of SL that makes it viable. Make SL more attractive to people and companies will follow.

[soror nishi]

I am on facebook, but have to say that the garbage increases exponentially with every passing day.
I think it will be surpassed and would have no interest in lowering the quality of SL to attract more "viewers", that is exactly what TV has done. It is now virtually unwatchable.

More is seldom better.

YoVille....? you HAVE to be kidding me.... surely.

[Eladrienne Laval]

While integration with Facebook might not be the answer, I can see how games like YoVille appeal to some folks. Might seems cheesy to SL folks, but maybe for the average user it's like a netbook: It's just what they want without the bells and whistles. I talked about this in my blog about a month or so ago:

http://elinsl.blogspot.com/2009/09/elle-in-yoville-virtual-worlds-and-ease.html

Sure, Facebook has the numbers that LL might like to tap into, but what I found was that one of the most appealing things to those I know who love YoVille (or FarmVille, etc.) is its ease of use. Easy interface, simple to use and run and no problem to jump right into it with friends that you already know. Rather than concentrating on Facebook itself, maybe that is something LL needs to think more about.

[Merlynn]

And what happens when Facebook goes the way of MySpace? It may be popular today, but next year there will be some other hot great new app that you just HAVE to TRY!
I'm convinced that the RL economic meltdown is directly due to people spending way too much time plurking, facebooking, tweeting, myspacing, plunking, and skreeing and never got any work done.

[Hamlet Au]

I agree, Eladrienne, but I think that LL and third party developers can work on both Facebook integration and a simplified interface. (Will talk more about the latter in later posts.)

"I think it will be surpassed and would have no interest in lowering the quality of SL to attract more 'viewers', that is exactly what TV has done"

Two more things to know about YoVille: a lot of its users are women in their 30s and 40s and also teens, so it's reaching a broader cros section than SL. And even as rudimentary as it is, it's already developed a market for user-generated content. The YoVille developers tell me they discovered that people were using the in-game whiteboard object to create art-- and selling it to other users. See a similar ecosystem of UGC in FarmVille, check it out:

http://www.wonderlandblog.com/wonderland/2009/10/farmville-art.html

[Hamlet Au]

"YEAH TODAY EVERYBODY USES FACEBOOK. But what if in 12-18 months another service (or a combination of services) puts Facebook out of the game, like Facebook previously did with MySpace?"

Ms. Obscure: That would be fine, because the SL account will have already been created and the user acquired. Though I find it highly unlikely that Facebook is going away any time soon. 300 MILLION ACTIVE ACCOUNTS. If they lost a million users every month, they'd lose half their total customer base... in TWELVE YEARS. And still have 150 million users.