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Virtual Worlds more popular than Facebook?

Mark Kizelshteyn — Fri, 08 May 2009 18:39:18 +0000

In a report from Nielson Games, Second Life is ranked the second Top PC game title in March. Virtual World News points us to this latest report, which looked at a 180,000 homes in the U.S and monitored Web and application activity. World of Warcraft is ranked number one, however, Second Life saw an average use of a 760 minutes per week, higher than the weekly use of World of Warcraft. The obvious problem that all virtual world enthusiasts point out is that Second Life is not a game like WoW. Although one of its many applications can be a game, it is not necessarily a fair comparison. Check out the rankings:

I am a bit surprised by this statistic, but it does reveal the underlying popularity of virtual worlds, which are only on the rise. “Massively points out that the virtual world [Second Life] is also topping out over popular social networks like Facebook and Myspace.” Also noting that “This data is measured from actual homes…Almost 200,000 of them, so it isn’t just data that’s centric to the hardcore gamer. This is a random sampling of ordinary people.” Here is a summary of their analysis:

YouTube: 47 minutes per week (via Cnet)
Facebook: 84 minutes per week (via Cnet)
Myspace: 10.5 minutes per week (via ITProPortal)
Second LIfe: 760 minutes per week (via Nielsen)

These numbers are pretty shocking and show both the popularity and robustness of virtual worlds. Where will they take us? Who knows, but we still need a lot of work on the infrastructure of virtual worlds before they become as ubiquitous as social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

[Via Virtual World News and Massively]

Firefox, Google and The 3D Web

Mark Kizelshteyn — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:01:26 +0000

This past week the Khronos Group, working with Mozilla (creators of Firefox) and Google, announced an initiative to create an open standard for accelerated 3D Web browsers. The group is leading a 12 month initiative aiming for release as part of the Canvas3D extension for Firefox 3.5.

As Virtual World News points out, “there are plenty of other developers and organizations trying to bring 3D to the Web, but most rely on plug-ins to do so, whether that’s the near ubiquitous Flash, a quickly growing Unity3D, or their own proprietary technologies. The benefit of the new standard, if it’s successful, would be that designers could include hardware-accelearated 3D graphics in their websites without forcing users to download a plugin. With OpenGL, JavaScript, and hardware acceleration available on pretty much all platforms, it could also make it easier to develop apps and environments across multiple contexts.”

People are expecting more and more of their online experience as we witness the shift from static desktop applications to dynamic web applications. The addition of 3D will add an array of new user experiences to the web app platform. Paul Jackson, an analyst with research firm Forrester, states: “…If you think about the traditional browsing experience of flat pages and links this is not a natural way to interact. People are much more used to walking around and picking things up so a 3D browser could lead eventually to a more naturalistic way of interaction…”

This standard could offer a significant shift in the 3D web by breaking down the end user barriers of entry. With the increase in web applications, people are reluctant to download bulky plug ins or software, but if the 3D environment is native to one’s browser, the potential is incredible. This team of developers and thinkers are industry leaders — allowing them to trail head this initiative will undoubtedly yield industry shifting results. I look forward to the release.

Social Networks and Happiness

Paul Fayngersh — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:18:58 +0000

A fabulous article over at Edge sheds light on research regarding individuals’ happiness as a function of their social networks. Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler demonstrate in a study published this month by British Medical Journal that “social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%.”

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When you're smiling...the whole world smiles with you

Working off this study they also explored 1700 college students and their connections on Facebook. In addition to verifying that happy people tend to have more friends, more interestingly they found that happiness is contagious; when visualized you can actually see clusters of “happy nodes.” They conclude that emotions are a deeply collective phenomena.

Edge: Social Networks and Happiness

Facebook Connect Launched

Mark Kizelshteyn — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:39:20 +0000

Facebook has officially launched Facebook Connect.

What’s Facebook connect?

According to the Facebook developers site, FC allows users to:

* Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your site
* Connect and find their friends who also use your site
* Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook

A dozen or so sites have been using the beta platform and currently the biggest is reportedly CitySearch, according to Facebook Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin. Morin also noted that in the Beta testing, users were using their Facebook login credentials 2:1 compared to pre-exisiting site logins.

This is going to give tons of tiny social networks accesses to Facebook’s 130 million users. Facebook is taking control of the market (one they already have a lot of control of).