My Talk at the SL Community Convention

Thought I'd give a little rundown of the speech I gave at the recent Second Life Community Convention in NYC. This event was special in that it was the first time that a very large group of Second Life users had convened in Real Life.  140 Second Lifers from around the country converged on New York for nearly two days of "metaversal madness". 

On Saturday night, everybody met up at a bar in the West Village.  Everybody wore nametags around their necks, with their avatar's name and picture on it.  People hugged, laughed and screamed things like, "My god, you're Chosen Few/Epitaxial Playfair/(any bizarre SL name you can think of)".  While there was certainly the expected oddness (people with Vampire teeth, etc.), what struck me was actually how normal it all was.  A little nerdy, perhaps, but the crowd was almost 50/50 male-female and everybody was very social, bright, and cool.

The next day, I spoke at the convention, and focused my talk on Evangelism.  What I discussed was how much we as a company and a fledging world are driven by evangelism, relying on the word of mouth and zeal of our users to grow.  What I tried to focus on was answering the following questions:

1. How can we talk more effectively about SL?
2.  What tools/programs can enhance and leverage this evangelism to take us to 1 million users?
3.  What makes something especially easy to evangelize? 

This last point is really interesting.   I would argue that Second Life is easy to Evangelize because of how interesting, bizarre and open-ended it is.  This contributes to our strong, linear growth.   But we lack several chararacterics necessary for us to grow exponentially:
1.  Simple to explain and learn
2.  Open Systems
3. . Social Network effect.  In most viral products, the individual’s quality of experience is directly correlated with the # of friends they pull in.

I also said that way we think of Second Life will change in the future.  It will not be an alternative to or escape from Real Life, but rather an enhancement of it.  And it’s up to us, the enhanced, enlightened early adopters to convey that to the next 940,000 users.

Finally, I brought up some dangerous ideas that will inform Second Life's course over the next year.  Some will certainly come to fruition -- others will simply begin their course to an eventual destination. 

i. We will continue to lower barrier between SL and the web
ii. We will begin the process of thinking about what it will take to put a metaverse server in Your Basement

iii.  Avatars that Speak in Real-time
iv. A Globally-accessable, Babelfish-enabled world.
v. Avatar Breeding

 

Comments

[Hiro Pendragon]

Reuben, I found "1. Simple to explain and learn" a challenge at first, but I recommend a simple checklist of points, in order:
A. Virtual world like an MMORPG but open ended.
B. Built in building tools.
C. Built in economy and people making real money. (This usually gets their attention.)
D. Next-gen browser for WWW.

A & B describe what it's like, C shows it's for real, and D shows its potential. Using this checklist, I've gotten much better at getting people interested quicker, and with less odd looks. :)

[Prokofy Neva]

You just threw in that "v. avatar breeding" to see if we were paying attention, right?

[SuezanneC Baskerville]

I think that for some, RL User breeding might be a bigger attraction.