Collaborative and distance communication

Before today, my only experience with Second Life was this clip from The Office:

So you can imagine my shock when I came across this website. That's right, there is an online newspaper devoted to the goings on of the virtual world of Second Life. I found this site after performing a Google search for "Second Life," and it took me about 10 minutes to realize what I was looking at.

After browsing the site for a few minutes, I found a link to an article in the New York Times written by Amy Harmon in January of 2004. Apparently, The Alphaville Herald started out as an online newspaper about an internet game called The Sims Online. Peter Ludlow, a philosophy professor, founded the newspaper as the unofficial paper for the fictional town of Alphaville. When he started to publish stories about seedy happenings in Alphaville (scams, cyber-prostitution, cyber-violence, etc.), EA Sports, the makers of The Sims Online, "killed" his character. This incident made international headlines. Shortly thereafter, Ludlow rebranded the website as the Second Life Herald and began focusing on the virtual world of Second Life.

In the aforementioned New York Times article, Ms. Harmon highlights several concerns for these types of online alternate reality games. "The currency of several online games can now be regularly purchased for real dollars on Internet auction sites, allowing people to buy their way into a higher level much as they might pay to get a child into a better nursery school." She quotes Mr. Ludlow about the dangers of the virtual money of The Sims Online gaining real market value. He said that this makes the notion of selling sex online more worrisome.

The alternate-reality gaming world amazes me. The fact that there are people who can devote so much of there time to something so trivial is actually a sign of collective economic prosperity. If you were to spend as much time playing Second Life in the 1700s as you do now (ignoring the obvious technological issues), you would starve to death. I just hope that the world economy continues to prosper so that I can enjoy a better standard of living in the future - but I don't see that happening if everyone eschews the real world in favor of the virtual one.

Viral Videos

Weezer made a music video about viral videos, and the music video went viral. Try saying that three times fast.

In 2008, Weezer released a single called Pork and Beans. In a move that reflected the band’s embrace of social media, they premiered the music video for the song on YouTube, four days before the televised debut on MTV. The video, which featured dozens of Internet phenomena, was an instant hit, amassing over 3.5 million views in its first week.

The first time I watched the video, I could feel my brain start to bleed as I tried to keep up with all of the memes. “Oh, there’s Miss Teen South Carolina! There’s the Afro Ninja guy! Wait, what is the deal with the guy with all of the tee shirts?” The video is a great way for people to test their viral video recognition skills. If you have seen all of the videos referred to in the music video, you have probably spent too much time on YouTube.

Matthew Cullen, who directed the video, sat down with Jenna Wortham of Wired.com to discuss the meaning of the video:

“(Pork and Beans) is this amazing song about being happy with who you are. That’s exactly where it came from. There’s never been a time like now, thanks to YouTube, where people can put themselves out there. So I embraced that concept.”

As Cullen explains, there is an actual person behind each of the people who have unintentionally become celebrities. Mark Hicks, the Afro Ninja, is a professional Hollywood stuntman who “made one mistake at a casting session that is etched in (millions) of people’s memories.” Cullen said that this video is a way for Hicks to show the world that he has embraced what happened and that he his happy with who he is.

Cullen and Weezer aren’t the only ones who understand the public’s deep appreciation for viral videos. Enter Daniel Tosh. The comedian has become one of TV’s brightest new stars as a result of his hit show, Tosh.0. The show focuses on online video clips with Tosh providing sarcastic commentary.

At one point in the show, he usually does a “web redemption,” where he meets with a person or group from a particularly well-known viral video. By doing this, he allows viewers to see the actual people in a setting other than the ones they were immortalized online in.

The show, which premiered on June 4, 2009, launched with an initial order of 10 episodes. It averaged over 1 million viewers per episode, and did particularly well with the coveted 18-24 and 18-34 demographics. It is now in its third season, averaging 2.2 million viewers per episode, beating out The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report to become Comedy Central’s highest rated non-animated show.

There is no doubt that Tosh’s biting humor is a big reason for the show’s success. But it has also succeeded because society is obsessed with viral videos. We enjoy watching them and are always excited to see what else is out there. On top of that, many of us are curious about the behind-the-scenes aspects of viral videos. Who are these people? Why did they act the way they did in the video? How have their lives changed since attaining web celebrity status? These are all questions that were being asked by hundreds of thousands of people, and Tosh.0 has effectively reached that market.

Location Based Programs

America’s Finest News Source (aka “The Onion”) may have mocked glowing media reports about Foursquare’s entrance into the social media world, but it looks like the tone of those media reports was justified.

This past summer, the number of Foursquare users reached 10 million, a 100 percent increase from December. Shortly after, the privately held company raised $50 in funding at a $600 million value.

Foursquare has established itself as a formidable player in the social media realm, worthy of being mentioned alongside Facebook and Twitter. But, as a June USA Today article reports, success of that magnitude comes with challenges.

Foursquare is a location-based service (LBS) that lets users win virtual prizes by using their smartphones to “check in” to the places they visit. Many people are weary about having their movements tracked and broadcasted online, and privacy concerns remain a major hindrance to further growth. In response to these concerns, Foursquare lets users decide for themselves whether or not they want to share their locations with a broader audience on Facebook and Twitter. If they want, users can have their locations shared with a small group of trusted friends.

This article brought up some interesting points about Foursquare’s utility. For example, a New York restaurant near Foursquare’s office has used the service to “break down its customer base by gender, age group and check-in time. Knowing when customers visit lets the restaurant plan operations when things are busy and offer specials when business is slow.”

Facebook, having already been on the winning side of creative destruction once before (see: Myspace), couldn’t just sit around and watch Foursquare get all the accolades. Consequently, it launched “Facebook Places” in August of 2010.

After a year of less-than-impressive results, reports surfaced that Facebook was killing off its “Places” feature. But, as Steve McClellan reported, Facebook wasn’t conceding the LBS marketing battle to Foursquare: “Agencies say that what Facebook is actually doing…may scale their location-based marketing capability in a way that could motivate a majority of their 500 million global members to add location data when using the site.”

Basically, Facebook just made it possible for users to tag status updates with their locations. They can do this on laptops, phones or any other portable device. Michael Nicholas, chief strategy officer at Aegis Group’s Isobar, described the move as an “embedded tag strategy that's about getting more people to put more location data into Facebook.”

The value of putting “more location data into Facebook” is that it makes the product more attractive to marketers. Marketers are constantly trying to dig up information on potential customers, and finding out what locations they visit and at what time of day gives them valuable consumer insight.

A rapidly increasing number of people are participating in location-based services, making it easier than ever before for businesses to learn about consumers’ daily behavior. It is obvious that consumers value the services provided by Foursquare and the like, but what will ultimately determine LBS’s success is how useful they are to businesses. Foursquare works with hundreds of thousands of merchants to develop incentives for people to check in at their locations, and if these merchants don’t see results, they will find other methods to bring in customers.