What Social VR Worlds Can Learn from Friendster (or For That Matter, Orkut)

What Friendster (Yes, Friendster) Teaches Us About Social VR and Virtual Worlds is a fun little essay by longtime metaverse developer/explorer Ryan Schultz, a case study in how online communities can shape a platform as much (if not more so) than the actual company can:

Friendster turned into a very different beast from what [founder] Jonathan Abrams had intended. Now, who would have predicted that? My main point is this: the people who create the software platforms think they have control, but it’s really the end users who shape the service and build the community that they want to see. Past a certain point, it’s completely out of the founders’ hands. Linden Lab understands this and, for the most part, they get out of the way of the insanely creative people who have built Second Life into what it is today. Nobody could have predicted all the fantastic directions that SL went into. And I can see the same thing happening already in Sansar, High Fidelity, and other virtual worlds.

I'd add Orkut as another great case study: a pioneering social network founded by a Google developer named Orkut in his spare time, which gained some rising popularity in the early aughts, especially because it had fun MMO-type leveling systems associated with a user. But as sociologist danah boyd once explained, Brazilian users of Orkut discovered an Orkut page which "ranked" countries in order of their usage -- and treating it like a World Cup soccer match, got all their friends and family in Brazil to join Orkut too, so Brazil would be on top of that chart. Which is why Orkut is now owned by a Brazilian company.

I should add this case study isn't true of all social networks: Thanks to its tight design and strict control of the user experience, Facebook still pretty much looks and operates how it was originally designed by Zuckerberg and crew. Then again, due to Facebook's lax moderation of its own advertising platform, Facebook was also just used to help Russian hackers influence the last US Presidential election, and here we are.

Comments

[Ryan Schultz]

Thanks!