Twitter Is What Second Life Wasn't: Light, Cheap and Open
And That's Why It'll Outlive the Hype Cycle
Here's why: Twitter is light, cheap, open and permanent, whereas Second Life is heavy, expensive, closed and ephemeral. Twitter does things right where Second Life failed.
Second Life is amazingly heavy, requiring lots of computer, lots of bandwidth and a commitment to client software. Second Life is a closed system, a walled city, completely invisible to serendipity and coincidence. Second Life is greedy, pushing avarice and commerce. Second Life is ephemeral and anti-textual, meaning that all of the work and energy one spent on Second Life invariably went away the moment people stopped investing time and money into the platform. While there was a programming language, a scripting language and lots of room for creativity, Second Life was not nearly as agnostic and open a platform as it could have been.
On the other hand, Twitter is open and has a fantastically generous API (an open API as opposed to a closed API, which is why so many developers have created such useful applications on top of the service). Twitter is highly textual, highly contagious and very much real time.
Consider its effect on content discovery. Google, the search king, always wants to know it is up to date, that it is on top of everything. It's constantly insecure that it will lose the war to upstarts. And when it comes to zeitgeist 2.0 -- real-time trend tracking and trend recognition -- Twitter moves even faster than breaking news scrawls and updates.
The most famous example is the rapidity with which the Twittersphere responds to tragic events like earthquakes, tornadoes, and terrorist events like the shootings in #mumbai and the #iranelection.
For a second, let's forget Twitter the website and look at how differently people access and engage with Twitter. Not only can one interface via the web or SMS, but there are also hundreds of desktop clients, iPhone and smart phone apps, and third-party mashups of sites and services.
That's what's funny: A large proportion of the API calls to Twitter these days aren't even made by humans twittering all day long. Rather, they're made by third-party search engines and services offering sundry services: finding friends, tracking news, graphing conversation, tracking searches, plotting trends, collecting metrics, following people, un-following people.
In many ways, the Twitter platform has become almost a fungible input-output flow of data, like IP, tap water, or the electrical mains -- all the creativity and all of the development is happening as a result of this relatively featureless and structure-less raw platform.
Everybody admits that the elegance of Facebook's interface does an amazing job of hand-holding the diverse levels of technological prowess that Facebook users possess. However, Facebook shares many things in common with Second Life: It is a walled-garden, cliquey and hard to cross-pollinate. And finally, Facebook works very hard at defining what the user experience is to the best of its ability in a world where openness and open access can often work for you instead of against you.
The biggest mistake that social network services and online virtual communities make is being too invested in the outcome of how the community will grow and develop. To be successful in community development and community creation, one must be committed to the community and meeting their needs versus being committed to giving them what the community producer thinks the community wants and needs -- often very different things.
At the end of the day, Twitter has always been more like the cardboard box holding the toy than the toy itself. Twitter seems to have built the perfect box to play in and with until you decide what sort of toy you want to build -- and then Twitter makes it possible for everyone and his brother to take a go at building the toy in the box, always just focusing on being the most amusing, easy-to-use, scalable and compelling box possible.
To me, Twitter is a lot like IRC from back in the day. When you install Internet Relay Chat, there are no rooms and there are no members. Only by engaging and by creating rooms and groups does it become truly useful. (Twitter and IRC share the same conventions in terms of using the hash, #, to indicate a self-organizing group that only exists as long as people choose to use it.)
The strange thing is is that Twitter is one of the very few applications -- Web 2.0 or not -- that gets the benefit of everybody trying to train each other via -- believe it or not -- morning talk shows, news spots, news specials, local get-togethers. Oprah! Ellen! The View! I mean, how many dot-com/Web 2.0 platforms have the benefit of that? On the flip side, the downside to Twitter's choosing not to carefully control every aspect of the user experience is that it's not always intuitive or apparent how to use it. The third-party apps may be more useful, but most newbies begin their experience at Twitter.com.
People who don't get Twitter really have not spent enough time with it. There are tons of ways people can use Twitter: Many people use Twitter as an alternative to an RSS feed news reader, following Twitter feeds of news organizations and news alerts, including links and so forth. Twitter doesn't care how you use it: passive reading or active conversation.
In fact, Twitter is such a neutral solution that you might very well forget that you're a member, which is why there might be a perception that over 60 percent of all of the users who visit the site don't go back the next month: Twitter doesn't want to be too much trouble.
~ ~ ~
Chris Abraham, president of the digital-PR firm Abraham Harrison, is a blogger who specializes in social-media marketing with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement and search-reputation management. Chris lives in Berlin and Washington and can be reached via Twitter, Facebook, or email.
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Twitter exists as a source of information, news, gossip, updates, conversation - it's a platform for communication between friends, families or even brands and their consumers. But all it takes is a little effort to follow people who share your interest, and all of sudden every column of TweetDeck is filled with life - the empty room we're all tweeting in at the start can get pretty crowded pretty quickly. Same with Facebook - maybe it's a walled in environment, but anybody who makes the slightest effort to connect with people can log in and see some activity.
None of that is true with Second Life, which would have benefited from a few more boundaries (vitutally geographically speaking). Second Life offers so much space there simply aren't enough people to occupy it, so it becomes very lonely very quickly. Really, there's nothing more depressing than wandering around an enormous Second Life mall and being the only one there. It's right about them when you look up and realize, huh...maybe my first life isn't so bad after all. So once the joy of flying is over (usually after the first 5 minutes), there's just not a lot more to do there.
However, I think both Facebook and Twitter face some of the same dangers that Second Life ultimately succumbed to, and that the increasingly visible presence of spammers, get-rich-quick schemes and sex pushers. More and more often I find myself unfollowing someone on Twitter who wants to show me how they made $5,000 posting Tweets, or how I can get thousands of new followers. Facebook is no different - I'm sure by now everyone on there has gotten a few suspicious e-mails from crooks trying to steal their name and password. If it happens enough, people will eventually stay away from these networks and look elsewhere for their networking. They'll still be around, but they'll be a shadow of their former selves - Second Life still exists, but it's little more than a virtual Red Light District in some seedy part of town.
I'm sorry - did I say that there was nothing more depressing than wandering around an empty Second Life mall? That was wrong - watching a Second Life stripper grind against a virtual pole goes well beyond depressing, and border on simply pathetic.
Jason Miletsky
CEO, PFS Marketwyse
Author, 'Perspectives on Marketing' and 'Perspectives on Branding'
http://www.pfsmarketwyse.com
http://twitter.com/jason_miletsky
Jason
I am really intrigued with what will come next from them. And yes, the Iran explosion via Twitter, I think, is the separating factor between Twitter and the rest.
But ultimately, I think that Google Wave will CRUSH everyone!
I will believe it when I see it -- and I sort of believe it already -- however, Twitter has an amazing lead and might very well benefit from making itself more of a need than a want.
Seeing the State Department preempt a scheduled Twitter maintenance because of what was going on in Iran was huge. I don't think any of us have realized how much of a change agent Twitter must really be if State is doing interventions.
I wonder if there may very well be Government and Homeland Security interest in the wellness and prosperity and success.
However, don't even quote me as saying that Twitter is too big to fail, but I have never seen anything with this level of ubiquity.
Sure, Twitter could very well -- surely -- fly high and then crash. Who knows. I don't think so. Thousands of companies have invested big bucks, big resources, and a lot of "face" into Twitter -- and I have invested over 18,000 tweets into Twitter.
I personally have a lot invested in Twitter. How about you?
Whats the usual measure of success? - the bottom line... How much money does twitter make? $0 - Second life is a monetised and profitable product.
The end of the day these services are a business model - and so far twitter only exists because someone is paying its bills (i'd hate to think about their hosting costs). If its trying to "win the race" as you say - when is the payout day for the investor? Twitter seems very reluctant to find a way to monetise - Either because they think it might put people off - or they cant think of an effective way to get people to pay.
"This financial mess" as you put it, I fear comes from the whole attitude of throwing money at something in the hope that some bigger fish will buy them off - rather than building a strategy that will profit enough to pay the running costs (at minimum). The bottom line isn't short sightedness - its a reality.
If Twitter does have a strategy and is holding back - all well and good. But I wouldn't start throwing around claims its a success over an already profitable company just yet.
Twitter knows -- and their investors know -- that the Twitterati will bail to FriendFeed, to Plurk, and to Laconi.ca the moment that Twitter start heavily monetization. Good timing is essential here and I think Twitter will focus, at first, on making money through B2B licensing, through Twitter PRO services (which might charge users money for extra API calls since we are only allotted 100 calls per/hour, which is a serious impairment when you follow tens of thousands of people -- hell I would pay for more API calls -- Twitter, hello?).
Anyway, I am coming from the assumption that Second Life is a wasteland, the only people who are really participating are academics who are researching and sharing and educating using Second Life's virtual world and a small cadre of faithfuls. I am assuming that most brands have abandoned SecondLife, though I may be mistaken.
I may be wrong, please enlighten me.
An then in your previous comment you say "did it fail? & "I am coming from the assumption that Second Life is a wasteland" & I don't hear much about it at all" - I suggest when making sweeping and provocative statements you do some research, otherwise someone might come along and challenge it ;)
You article talks of "Outlive[ing] the Hype Cycle" - Well second Life seems to be surviving without the hype cycle doesn't it? Believe me I don't think its perfect by any means. But its standing on its own two feet which a lot of web companies cannot claim.
You say that Twitter is open, free and you cant lose your content on it? really? Is this so? - Again - someone else is bankrolling your content here - if Twitter would fold over night - so would all of its content (unless you've read it into an external db of course, have you done that?).
In regard to Google, yes Google does index Second Life - Google is used for its search engine and also its mapping system. that content is just not shown on web search.
I think you are right to say that people will jump ship if Twitter were to start to heavily charge for its services. That's why I think they may just be waiting for someone like Google to buy them out. Their competitors have much more functionality, all they don't have is the brand recognition. That's hardly a recipe for outlasting the Hype Cycle either is it? Twitter has trouble meeting the load as it is, let alone with more functionality.
I agree that the nature of Twitter would make it easier to survive in theory. Text messages are a lot simpler to deal with than a complex persistent 3d environment. But, like I was saying - if it can't sustain itself then it its not really going to live much past the free lunch.
Most Twitter APIs are used by SEO and new media gurus in all kinds of money-making schemes of what many see as the most shoddy and greedy kind (just look on Twitter and who uses it for God's sake), and the really major power usage of Twitter is by firms that want to scrape the data to sell ads or sell commercial information about users for commercial purposes. *And that's ok*. Isn't that what YOU do?
Why would somebody putting up a commercial island for a campaign or a long-time customer relations presence in SL be "greedy" and someone scraping all the data of tracking trends for commercial purposes be blessed as "cool"? Makes no sense. Different tools for different purposes and outcomes.
Trying to compare Twitter with its massive numbers of users and Second Life with its small number of users is like complaining that CNN has a lot of users and the New Yorker only has a small number of subscribers. They are different forms of media, used differently and one need not cancel out the other.
Your take on SL seems to have evolved mainly through its hyping by a few of the very ad agencies that prop up this very site here storming on the scene in 2007 and deciding, at a time when they were hugely nervous and scared over huge amounts of loss of ad revenue from dying newspapers, that perhaps virtual worlds and games were the "next big thing". They were too early and too clueless with this, but that's a function of their expectations. These same ad companies have gotten no more ROI from Twitter than they've gotten out of SL (Skittles, anyone?)SL is good for a deeper, more intensive purpose, for meetings and raising of awareness and support -- really building communities; and also for small business inworld.
SL offers you that more intensive interaction that is essentially a replacement for f2f meetings because you are in an immersive environment and able to reach people at an intellectual and emotional level, with real-time interactive 3-D communication, that you just can't reach with a 140 tweet. Serendipity rules in SL
But the point of social media is not to keep communications in some big file -- both SL and Twitter are on Google, and there are applications such as those your digital PR new media firm uses for clients.
Twitter is not a place where you can build relationships and collaborat -- it's a signal pusher with a lot of noise pushing against it, for life-casting or mind-casting, but little means of taking it beyond the cursory clipped expression except by going into Friendfeed or on Skype or into Second Life or Metaplace or some other venue for voice or text chat without Twitter restrictions.
You don't need to defend Twitter by bashing on Second Life. Your assessment of SL's hype cycle is based on superficial media reports and not research of the sort you wouldn't accept as true if they were about Twitter. Twitter is overhyped and will undergo a crash in old media coverage, too, just like Second Life. You're oblivious to the role that dying old media played in touting both Twitter and SL, and tone deaf to the possibilities for both Twitter and SL *after* the old media hype is over. In fact the two services are complementary and not contradictory.
Or are you saying you didn't even bother to search that one time you came to Second Life, and just made a lazy click on the old "Popular Places"? By popular outcry, that list was removed because it was all gamed by bots and camping (SEO tricks) -- there is a more curated and meaningful list of suggestions now under Showcase and at many resident-made infohubs like mine in Ross.
While SL can have a steep learning curve, the very basics -- search on topics to go to events and places -- are just like Google and just as easy to use. Talking to other people is as easy as it is on Twitter.
If you typed in words like Obama, Iran, non-profit, government, science, history, literature, etc. you might have a very different experience than visiting clubs with AFK dancers on sex poles -- something that in fact really does make up a small portion of Second Life even if it gets inflated traffic from bots like the SEO gurus on Twitter now get seemingly enormous numbers of followers using automatic scripts).
You *do* put filters on your email to get rid of the Viagra ads, right? You can do the same in SL.
In the last few weeks, here are some of the things I've done in Second Life:
o hosted an event to talk to people around the world who came through serendipity -- educators, journalists, human rights activists, etc. to talk about Iran and the "Twitter Revolution" and talk about ways to be supportive to democracy in Iran.
o followed a lecture by a U.S. government official about Obama's technology programs and social media strategies
o visited the MacArthur Foundation's island to learn about their programs funding all kinds of interesting projects around the world
o visited three amazing art installations and discussed with fellow visitors
o attended 3 live music concerts by artists with original music
o wrote a 3-D interactive science fiction story and interacted with other people in the story to discuss what new technology will bring to us -- and take away from us in the future
o made US $200 from my rentals and content business above costs to use on real-life bills
What did I do on Twitter? I *talked* about the Iranian revolution but didn't *do* anything about it. I spent an hour trying to weed out all the SEO goofs following me to get follow-backs using scripts. I learned about a few interesting articles -- but often the same articles I get pasted to me in numerous groups and chats in SL on all different subjects.
I'm an early adapter of Twitter and it's all good, but a time suck.
Actually, I came to my conclusions based on pretty extensive research I did for the college textbook I've recently had published, "Principles of Internet Marketing" (http://bit.ly/63dB5). In the book, I dedicate a good part of one chapter to virtual worlds, with a specific focus on SL, including an interview with an organization that runs a fairly significant island there. While I didn't editorialize in the book, I was able to come to some pretty sound conclusions. If I had any preconceived notions at all before I first went on SL, they were positive - I wanted to like it.
But neither my comment nor Chris' original post were about whether or not we like SL. Like has nothing to do with it. It's about SL's place in the online universe as a widely used tool for social networking and/or marketing.
I always find it amusing, however, how people who are so crazed and passionate about Second Life are so incapable of seeing the reality behind the business of the Internet. I'm sure you generated $200 last week, and have had plenty of conversations with other people there. But the fact of the matter is that if it ever reached critical mass in terms of a being a viable marketing or social networking vehicle, it did so awhile ago and shows little chance of recapturing any former glory. If you'd like, I'd be more than happy to spend a few minutes finding links to charts showing the significant loss of media attention and brand usage over the past year or more.
Fanatics, whether their obsessions be for Star Wars, Star Trek, Second Life or something else, are welcomed to have their passion. But don't let your love of something cloud your ability to see the reality behind it.
Jason Miletsky
CEO, PFS Marketwyse
Author, 'Perspectives on Marketing' and 'Perspectives on Branding'
http://www.pfsmarketwyse.com
http://twitter.com/jason_miletsky
I totally agree with your description of Twitter vs. Facebook/Plurk/others, about the openness of Twitter and its myriad applications, about how it resembles IRC, about how people use it as an "intelligent RSS feed" (I'm certainly one of them!). There is nothing to disagree with :)
However, I completely fail to understand the relationship with Second Life. Twitter is owned by a company of geeks that just raised venture capital and burn it like crazy keeping the servers up, without a business plan, without a revenue model, and thriving on — numbers and hype. That, in itself, is nothing wrong — after all, all the others are *exactly like that* (when Facebook burned out all their money in 2007, they invented a fake number for their value and sold a share to Microsoft, which should be enough to keep them going on for a few years more — until they sell another share, and so on). Twitter is a cool idea which is simply impossible to monetise; like, unfortunately, almost all Web 2.0 applications out there. One day we'll look back to them all, after the Web 2.0 bubble bursts, and think how we could have done the same mistake *twice*. But we did :)
Second Life has nothing to do with that. It's probably one of the rarest cases where not only it turns a healthy profit but has already paid its return on investment. Since the "hype years" of 2006/7, Second Life has grown in all areas — number of users; stickiness (number of hours users spend in-world); and other metrics which are only relevant to Second Life users (landmass; internal economy; etc.) — up to three to four times *after* the "hype days", it never grew so fast *after* the media lost interest in it. And it still grows — 12-15,000 new users every day. It's not only a "playground for universities and research labs" — like the Internet overall, and the World-Wide Web, isn't seen as a "playground for academics" any more. That doesn't mean that universities aren't doing incredible things with Second Life — but that's just a very small chunk of what's being done. Prokofy Neva above gave a lot of good examples. There are more. Far more. And most interestingly, more and more projects in Second Life are starting *now* with a development time of 2-3 years...
Too closed? Weird that you mention that. The Second Life client is *open source* and there is an open source server solution (think Apache vs. MS IIS). Second Life can fully communicate with the outside world using HTTP/XML-RPC and SMTP...
Interesting article. However I don't agree with the approach you've taken, juxtaposing a soaring twitter vs. a nosediving secondlife. Totally factually inaccurate on both counts, but I will give you kudos points for interesting creative writing, and also for such class leading and genre defining selective reporting.
Its a shame that you decided to wrap your points on the evolution of twitter and its userbase in a sensationalist wrapper.
Let me be blunt here, because I think you're lacking in either experience of virtual worlds as a whole or just relevent recent data.
You're wrong about everything you wrote about secondlife. You're either very ignorant of, or selectivley reporting, facts about twitter, and as many have and will point out you're comparing two totally different things, from which you can draw no conclusion. Your initial point is akin to me saying "Secondlife is wayyy better than twitter, because in secondlife you can stream live music". Twitter was never designed to stream live music. How can you possibly therefore hold it as a failing when comparing the two? Similarly, Secondlife was never designed to be a light, platform friendly, 'understand it in a heartbeat' experience. Its much deeper, richer and has much more long term value than something so shallow as a tweet.
Yours is the definition of a shockingly bad article and I think you need to go back and look at your fact checking procedures. Frankly, i'd be embarassed.
"People who don't get Twitter really have not spent enough time with it." Well, you could say the same about anything, including secondlife. Including the circus, or riding elephants. But particularly, secondlife.
"Second Life is ephemeral and anti-textual, meaning that all of the work and energy one spent on Second Life invariably went away the moment people stopped investing time and money into the platform." Seriously? Are you on meth? Work continues unabated inside Secondlife, and outside it. New technologies and new ways of bridging gaps between existing web apps like google earth and the virtual world are advancing in leaps and bounds. Educators, governments, are finding uses that increase knowledge retention, cut down on public expenses, and a ton of usersare having a lot of fun making cool crazy stuff and sometimes making a buck out of their digital hobby. Compare that to "On the bus.. its raining. Wish I wasnt on the bus" or whatever inane message the *majority* of tweets comprise.
I can see what you needed to do. Story about twitter, meh, not so interesting. Editor was probably going to bump it. Mix it up with secondlife, though, and hey, now we have an angle. But you've underestimated your audience. We are not the dumb, iphone thumbing twitter-philes. We are tech savvy, we know our industry, we know its uses and we know its potential. Twitter is at the end of its evolution, with nowhere to go. VW's are just beginning, they are a vat of polymorphic potencia, a universe just sparking into existence, NOW.