technology awareness

Yesterday, Jon Taplin asked me to give my future of virtual worlds talk to his COMM 306 class, "The Communications Revolution, Entertainment and Art." His class was initially slow to ask questions, but once they got rolling it was great fun. Especially in an extended Q&A after class, they had very good queries about the impact of technology on privacy and culture.

They were quick to work through the implications of always on, mobile devices. Jon asked them whether they would consider life logging, or streaming the world around them to their friends. Initially it was the usual "hell no" but as they built on each others answers and started thinking through the implications, it didn't take long to get to "it's a natural extension of blogging", "I'd share it with my friends", "I'm bad at remembering names", and "I do it with Flickr already."

It was also a chance to sample a group of college juniors about technology. (It's a fairly large class, although predominantly communication and comm management undergrads, so obviously there are biases.)

Approximate percentages who had heard of or used the following (as measured by the incredibly scientific method of asking the audience questions and counting hands):

• Cell phone: 100%
• SMS: 100%
  
• Digital music/media: 100%
  
• Facebook: 95% (ie, almost everyone)
  
• Instant Messaging: 95%
  
• MySpace: 80%
• Regularly update something online: 75%
  
• LinkedIn: 40%
• Second Life: 25%
• Blog: 20% (lots of people who updated their MySpace page did not consider it blogging, hence the something stat, above)
  
• Online games: 10%
• World of Warcraft: 10% (and great reluctance to admit it)
  
• Twitter: 1 person (!)
• Knew about RSS or used it: 0%
• Had heard of Spore: 0% (!)
  
• Had heard of Sony Home: 0% (not as surprising as Spore, but still...)
  

As we think about games, virtual worlds, and technology -- rants aside -- it's easy to forget the differences between adoption rates and awareness.

To first order, everyone has a cell phone, listens to music, wants to be connected to their friends, and uses the web.

Good lessons as we think about the future.

secrets and lies

One the unexpected bits of feedback from the MetaverseU conference was that a lot of people are convinced that I'm already off working on the next big thing but that I'm just keeping it secret and not telling anyone. Are you kidding me? Let me be clear, when I start working on something I will be talking about it here. Obviously, if I’m working for someone else and they’d prefer secrecy, that’s their choice, but if it is my project, I’ll be yammering on about it.

Being a stealthy startup is tempting, sure, but the awful reality of any startup – much like any game idea – is that if you’ve thought of it, there are two other teams somewhere working on the same project. If your idea or business is only going to succeed because nobody thinks to compete with it, you’d best spend some time coming up with new ideas.

More importantly, you should be thankful other companies are out there evangelizing and experimenting. It is bloody difficult to build a new sector or industry alone, so competitors help raise awareness and attract customers. You also never have the time or resources to try everything you’d like to, so the natural divergence between competing products is free testing.

I think this was one of the most important decisions of early Linden culture and kudos to Philip for introducing it and then supporting it when the rest of us ran with it. It may seem slightly counterintuitive, but once you noodle on it a bit, being open is a tremendously positive and competitive move. It forces your ideas to survive far broader scrutiny, makes it easier to hire, and lets your early employees do what they want to be doing anyway: brag about their cool, new company.

It’s similar to considering how to talk about competitors. Sure, having enemies can be motivational and useful when you are getting started, but you and your competitors are collaboratively shaping the landscape for your new companies. Spending time publicly bashing them makes you look like an ass and hurts your ability to work together down the road. It is rare for any sector to be winner-take-all – even eBay has competitors – and multiple, high-quality products in a space can help ensure the overall business grows far quicker than any one company could on its own.

So, for right now, I’m teaching, consulting, and speaking. When I decide on what’s next, you’ll be the first to know.

i <3 my class

Last night was the first meeting of Cmgt 534: Introduction to Online Communities. My co-teachers, Professor Karen North and Clint Schaff, got to meet our students for the first time. What an amazing group! I had been generally excited about the idea of teaching but was completely unprepared for the diversity of expertise present in this group. From the Second Life CSI:NY project at CBS to the Institute for the Triple Helix, from a mystery author -- who's book looks very cool -- to Gone Gitmo, this APOC cohort is definitely going to teach me as much as I teach them.

I think the real challenge will be not grabbing them for startup ideas :-)!

apoc

Since James asked, my personal and professional connections to the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California go back to May of 2005. Randy Farmer, of Lucasfilm's Habitat fame, posted to his blog that the USC Center for Public Diplomacy was creating a new project: Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds. This project arose out of research Doug Thomas and Josh Fouts conducted in Star Wars: Galaxies indicating that virtual interactions could generate opinion changes similar to exchange programs. Randy noted that Second Life would be a good platform for this and I agreed, so I emailed Doug and Josh, who were nice enough to respond. We met at the Hotel Fig during E3 '05, and after hours of discussion about Second Life, public diplomacy, working for the US government, hacking, and virtual worlds in general, I had two new friends and they agreed to go take a look at Second Life. In the years since, CPD has been central to some amazing projects in SL.

• Second Life projects were 3 out of the 4 finalists in the "Using Video Games to Reinvent Public Diplomacy."
• CPD has brought several conferences into SL, including the 2007 iSummit in Dubrovnik and Interdependence Day in Mexico City.
• CPD received a MacArthur Foundation grant to explore philanthropy in virtual worlds.

Along with the Berkman Center at Harvard and the Institute for Information Law and Policy at NYLS, Annenberg has been a regular source of knowledge and debate. So, I was excited when Annenberg asked me to co-teach a class back in August. I was originally planning to only spend one evening a week in LA, but now that I am no longer working at Linden, I may spend a bit more time at USC.

The class I am teaching is part of the Charles Annenberg Weingarten Program on Online Communities, an intensive 1 year Master's Program that pulls together a gifted cohort of students and a great mix of professors. As the class progresses, I will definitely be writing more about it.