4 posts tagged “virtual worlds”

I had a chat with a friend last night about what “Web 2.0″ is.  He, a young marketing exec, thought that it was basically a programming term and that since he wasn’t hearing it that much anymore, it’s kinda a dead trend.  Oh no, I told him.  It’s much more than a marketing term for programming.

Basically I separated Web 2.0 into 3 areas: Design, Programming and Community.  I said that any one of the elements, done correctly, could qualify something as up for a Web 2.0 label, but a combination of the three ensured it.

• Design
• I am writing a creative brief today and started digging around to see if I could find some references for aesthetics I am partial to.  In doing so, I uncovered this nice writeup that summarizes some of the typical design elements found in a “web 2.0″ site.
• http://f6design.com/journal/2006/10/21/the-visual-design-of-web-20
•  Programming
• I told my friend, if you hear the words Ruby, Python, Drupal or AJAX used, you are dealing with a Web 2.0 site.  Of course, many other programming languages are used to achieve the kind of drag and drop feel of a Web 2.0 site, but these are the big ones lately.  These are also nice languages to see on a developer’s CV if you are hiring them for a job, as, even if they are not experts in any of the languages, they are forward thinking.
• Community
• How happy am I that the accidental career path that I wandered onto has become such a superstar in the industry. :) 
• Users are #1 in the Web 2.0 era.  You have to figure out a way to not only provide ways for your company to hear and communicate with your audience/users, but to actually listen and value their input.  Voting, focus groups, user enhances product design - the list is becoming infinite in the ways a company can immerse itself it it’s audience and become better for it. 

Let me know if I missed any major facet of Web 2.0.  I think most characteristics will fall in these buckets though.

Now that Web 2.0 has become normal, the fun begins.  Virtual worlds, user-centric design and strategies, MTV and video game raised kids becoming executives and generally blurred lines between companies and users are just the beginnings of a new era of business.  Web 2.0 isn’t dead, it was just the beginning. And I am excited for things to come.

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Tags: web2.0, design, mtv, video games, virtual worlds

10. Virtual worlds set up by toy manufacturers.
Another point from Lord Puttnam’s keynote, casting doubt on whether it’s such a good idea for toy firms to be launching their own virtual worlds - Mattel (with Barbie) and Lego being two examples. The idea of child entertainment funded by toymakers isn’t new (He-Man and Transformers, anyone?), but Lego’s Mark William Hansen had an elegant and considered response, pointing out that a virtual world launched purely to sell products is bad - but that kids will see that most quickly, and desert it.

Virtual Worlds Forum Blog » Blog Archive » Top 10 takeaways from the first day of VWFE 2007

I completely agree with this.  The first question that that needs to be asked when the topic of a virtual world (or any community initiative) comes up is “Why do we need/want it?”  It is the job of the web strategist to find the root of the request and to deal with the answer frankly. 

If the goal of adding community is to increase sales of offline product alone, community is probably not the correct strategy.  Starting a community is difficult work, maintaining one is even harder.  And there are risks involved that have to be dealt with in much more faster and comprehensive ways than just releasing a press release.

If the goal is, rather, to engage your audience in a very personal way with your brand and/or product, then you are starting on the right foot.  Sure, selling products is a fine goal, it’s the easiest way to sustain the community and makes complete sense, especially if the community is involved in some way.  But it shouldn’t be the primary goal - if it is, there are easier ways to achieve it.

Creating a community or virtual world is not a small decision, nor is it a finite decision either.  It’s funny to me how the enormity of a concept diminishes when the words become more common.  “Community” and “World” are BIG concepts - they are (or should be) big strategies for a company to adopt as well.

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Tags: marketing, virtual worlds, toys, vwfe2007

Those of us who understand the positive aspects of online play need to help shape the climate online in the next couple years. Gone are the days of bragging about how your child knows so much more about technology/computers/internet than you do. More and more of our lives are being spent online. Let’s treat that sea change with a bit more respect than simple awe/wonder.

If we don’t want EVERY brand space online to be blatant consumerism with no message or goal, we have to be proactive about preventing that from happening. We must work toward not just calling out the bad sites, but creating and commending the good sites. And not just ones that give lip-service to more holistic goals - ones that actually step up and do it.

I ducked out of the Kids and Teens talk at the Virtual Worlds conference last week in order to see a young girl doll brand case study. Oy vey, was that a hard one to sit through. The developer giving the talk continually talked sarcastically about the girly brand that he developed, which showed me that he didn’t respect the audience and community the site was trying to develop. How can you create a great community if you don’t care about them?

Through his talk, he talked a couple times about the core values of “Empowerment” etc that the site’s founders wanted to convey in the virtual world. But almost in the same breath, he would reiterate multiple times that the only purpose for the site was to “sell more dolls.” Makes you wonder if the brand managers of those dolls know and care how their brand is being conveyed to conference audiences and their online community.

If “to sell more dolls” is truly the reason that the parent company wanted to launch this world, fine. They certainly are not alone. But that doesn’t mean all the other sites that will be developed in this category have to be like that.

Sesame Street’s Panwapa world is a cool approach to get into a space that is bound to be crowded in the next 2 years - preschool to early readers, 4-7 year olds. Kudos to them for being there before anyone else with a solid idea for a world (and not just the mindless wandering and silly games that make up almost every world in this space).

Whether we like it or not, a child is assimilated into the tech space earlier and earlier as the years go by. To pretend that this isn’t happening or block the kids from sites on a micro level is not the way to improve the situation. It’s the ostrich effect and doesn’t improve anything for anyone, especially the kids.

People who grew up with technology are now having kids. These younger generation parents have less or no aversion to introducing their kids to the online/tech coolness that they have grown up with. As producers of content (be it for a marketing purpose or pure creative), we have to develop for the parents AND the kids. These younger parents will still want the educational aspects that the past decade of attentive parents wanted, but the younger parents understand all of this on another level. Many of them understand that you can have fun, build relationships, and develop as a human online. They also understand the importance of design, navigation and user interface in your online experience. AND they will, directly or indirectly, teach these concepts to their kids.

Hopefully the content will start to catch up with paradigm shift that is happening world-wide as I type. Is your content up to the task?

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Tags: panwapa, sesame street, proactive, virtualworlds,

Visionary Panel - Where the Platforms Are Going Next
The media has been largely dominated by one virtual worlds platform but innovation is coming fast and furious on multiple fronts from multiple vendors. This one-of-a-kind session brings together the visionaries of the major platform companies for an interactive discussion on the future of the virtual worlds platform.  Join us for a session you won’t want to miss.
- Christopher Klaus, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Kaneva
- Raph Koster, President, Areae, Inc.
- Michael Wilson, CEO, Makena Technologies
- Hui Xu, Founder & CEO, HiPiHi Co., Ltd
- Stephen Lawler, General Manager of Virtual Earth, Microsoft
- Corey Bridges, Co-founder, Executive Producer, & Marketing Director, The Multiverse Network
- Mark Wallace, blogger , 3pointD.com (moderator)

What does the future look like?
- A Common App is needed - so that all the worlds are not so compartmentalized and there is greater portabilty
- More incorporation of Social Networking features and games
- Usability hurdles need to be dealt with - the average person still finds most VWs to be too difficult and there is little being done for the mobile platform
- Controlled Identity management to all you to manage all of your identities in all of your worlds, with your own criteria for privacy and transparency

3D/Social Search Fans
    - “3D is a red herring” Raph Koster
        - we should be talking about 3D not as the next big thing, but as an aspect
        - More important question is regarding what we are using these space for and ding inside of them
        - 3D doesn’t work for everything - shopping market

Hui Xu, HiPiHi CEO, brought up how non-multiculti the crowd was
- he felt that culture blending and learning form other cultures was the biggest potential for these worlds
- No standard language exists to discuss these spaces yet, we don’t have a multi-lingual tool to bridge the gaps and we don’t have the world view mind set to talk theoretically yet.

The web migrated monetization models
= Subscription > Commerce/Ads
- vws have to do the same
- Migration needs to be Ads > Goods > Services
    - new toys are helping this transition
   
QQ (?) service - IM, Virtual E-commerce

Mobile Phone banking is very big overseas now

Local search is an opportunity to monetize
- ads need to excel in AI to raise relavancy

Mirror worlds will be the link to the Mass market
- Education contexts
- MS Live maps - Accurate to 4 inches
- Real versus Imaginary
- Melt content - reenact a bank robbery from earlier

“We are in the bookstore business - not the fiction or non-fiction business” - need to stop seeing everything as mutually exclusive

“Blogging in 3D is dumb” - Raph Koster

Representationally Agnostic
- data will show up how the user want it

3D is hard form many populations to grasp
- kids, older, etc
- it is not the holy grail

We need to jump over the now and next and think about later

Wii-mote and Hardware is helping innovation
- 3D mouse

Multiverse is sketchup compatible

Language - vulcanization of cultures
- there are translators for vws

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Tags: areae, hipihi, multiverse, kaneva, future, kids, tweens