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When you say VOIP, most people think of Skype or Vonage. Second Life? From Venture Beat…
[Linden Labs] is announcing today that its users have used its web-voice calling feature to talk to each other for a total of 15 billion minutes since it was introduced 18 months ago.
The voice-over-Internet-protocol web calling service inside the virtual world is now being used at a rate of 1 billion minutes per month, said Mark Kingdon, chief executive of Linden Lab in San Francisco. By comparison, the VOIP service Skype has been used for 200 billion minutes in the past six years. At any given moment, 50,000 Second Life residents are using the voice application.
“Voice is one of the crown jewels of Second Life,” said Kingdon, who joined Linden Lab as CEO about a year ago.
Every month the New York Times or some other tech rag writes a piece explaining that the death of Second Life will happen any day now. They tell us the collapse of The Mainland and thousands of private islands will soon cease to exist.
The problem with this is that Linden Labs (the company behind Second Life) continues to dump salt in their wound by remaining successful and profitable. Yes, they are a profitable company in the worst economy since the Great Depression. Users spend more time online per account than other MMOs, new member growth continues to go up and the concurrency (the number of people online at the same time) is higher month after month after month.
We continue to help real world customers move into Second Life - mostly with small private island builds. We aren’t the only one who have noticed things are still good in Second Life. Mitch Wagner comments:
As a journalist and Second Life enthusiast, I’m annoyed by irresponsible articles that take it for granted that the virtual world is dying, or already dead, or a failure. In fact, Second Life is healthy and growing — I say this based on personal experience, and statements made by officials of Linden Lab, the company that created, develops and operates Second Life.
Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon described a couple of the signs of Second Life’s health in an interview Wednesday conducted inworld at Metanomics, an interview program hosted by Cornell University, conducted inside Second Life.
Yeah, the death watch continues on the web… the vultures continue to circle Linden Labs but they are looking a bit thin these days - they just aren’t getting anything to eat. Maybe they should move on to ValleyWag? The corpses there are impressive.
Audrey Tautou is an amazing actress. I first “discovered” her in Amélie and tried to see everything in her filmography.
In this commercial for Chanel, there is no dialog. The story is told purely though Tautou’s acting abilities and the wonderful cinematography.
Honda once again uses their product to create stunning visual displays. I don’t think it matches the creativity of the famous Cog ad, but it comes close.
The NYT has reported on the demise on Google’s 3D metaverse product, Lively.
In my work as creative director, I do a fair amount of projects in Second Life, so I know where the hype ends and ROI begins. It took only a few minutes to determine that Lively had a very limited shelf life. Their first crime was that Lively only worked on Windows platforms - this is a multiplatform world, keeping spiritual resonance with Redmond these days is the kiss of death. If some under-funded start-up was bringing us Lively, I could understand the Windows Only mentality, but this was a Google product. So the thousands of art directors in the ad agencies of America, who were slaving away on the next big campaign, were ignored by the Lively roll-out because most of them are on Macs.
To say that Second Life is a failure is to say the web was a failure in 1996. Remember back then when every company knew they needed a website but had no clue what to do with it? Just how many of those horrible 90s era websites have we blocked out? Oodles probably. But the web didn’t fail, the web sites failed because the developers didn’t know how to make the sites generate ROI.
Virtual worlds are in the same boat. Very few companies out there have a clue about how to generate ROI for their clients with virtual world campaigns. I recently met with a San Francisco Bay Area ad agency who had a client who wanted to invest in Second Life and the ad agency talked them out of it, mostly because they didn’t know how to generate ROI for that medium. Inexcusable. There are plenty of ways to get your clients product into Second Life and have it be a success. It is done everyday.
But there is another reason why Lively failed and it is a problem through out their product line. Google became number one without advertising. Not one ad campaign was ever developed or deployed for Google. Last week, ClickStream published the results of a study showing Google Docs having difficulty finding a foothold against Microsoft products. Well, duh. Guess who has an ad budget?
If no one knows about your product, it is impossible for them to buy it. The process of buying denotes a previous familiarity, even if it is just brand recognition, that is sometimes enough to make the sale. But if you choose to keep quiet about a product, there is not going to be a lot of urgency to buy.
So why did Lively fail? Plenty of reasons, none of which are related to virtual worlds or the marketability of virtual worlds.
And if you still think virtual worlds are never going to take off, check out this little product.
I guess one of “Obama’s Changes” will be quick action in government. From a marketing point of view, time kills all deals and for government, getting a website up and running is typically this huge, painful and slow process. Committees, political strategists, poll gurus and media analysts are usually all involved before even a bland piece of government brochure-ware sees the light of day.
Brand Obama is not having that. Overnight, Brand Obama has been feverishly at work on Change.GOV and it is now live, less than 48 hours after he won the election. Change.GOV looks to be the portal for the new Obama government with the Obama agenda, complete with the ability to share your own ideas. My past US Representative never wanted to hear from me. If I wrote in complaining, all I would get back is a snide letter more or less telling me I was uneducated about the issue and I needed to trust in the President. That has been my recent experience with government, adult to child and I am on the kindergarten end of the relationship.
Moving back to Brand Obama, his new Change.GOV almost seems… competent. I rarely am impressed with the marketing savvy of politicians. I have some past experience with political strategy and you would be amazed how candidates would sabotage themselves by ignoring common sense results from focus groups. So when a politician pulls off something like the Webbie deserving BarackObama.com, and it turns out not to be a web fluke, but a well thought out social media strategy, it gives one… oh, what is the word I am looking for here?
You know… ah yes.
Hope.
Typically, I am hard to impress. As a creative director, I always strive to make sure my client’s marketing image is top notch and that takes time and multiple revisions. It is the same situation with ad delivery platforms. Just how many flash embedded ad networks does it take before I start to roll my eyes? Maybe three, four if it is Christmas.
A few weeks ago, I attended the SFBeta event in San Francisco and met Nik Bonaddio, the Creative Director of Spongecell. Guess what? He has another rich media ad solution but there was one simple thing that kept me from turning toward the bar to start swilling Anchor Steam - rich media ads that are socially aware.
I have seen other attempts - sloppy attempts, but Spongecell and Bonaddio pulled it off. Expanding on where they are now, imagine seeing an ad for a movie and then adding the local theater to your Google Maps and the show time to your calendar. Click-through metrics are so yesterday. How many calendar inclusions did your ad receive? How many MySpace friends did you gain? Those are the metrics I like.
Wherever people gather there is the chance for humanity to impart itself upon those gathered.
We should expect no less from Second Life.
In a garden pavilion on an island, I sat with an assortment of human beings - one clad as a teddy bear wearing a Santa hat, another as a brazen vixen, a blue man, a tuxedoed prom king - and poured out my heart from a place of loneliness and grief. Click click went the computer keys, like the staccato beat of my heart. Clack clack went their replies, their empathy and their own tales of triumph and woe. Via my avatar - the persona I’d created to engage here - I was participating in an “anxiety support group” in the free, virtual world of Second Life.
As I write those words, I can hear the scoffing. Pathetic! Escapist! Are you addicted to computer games? Do you have no friends? Second Life? That place is just about weird sex fantasies!
I saw my first instance of online group therapy in the form of an email list in the mid-90s. Second Life is no different really, it is just a more immersive experience than email. And that immersion could be the key to better connections and a more expressive group therapy experience. Gone are the vulnerabilities of speaking to strangers in person. Expressing issues is more important I believe than rubbing elbows at the local church.
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