Op/Ed: Google Whacks LL’s Ad Options
by Alphaville Herald on 19/07/08 at 12:46 am
by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk
unemployed bots forced to seek Lively jobs as chat session miners and ad customizers?
The Herald newsroom was quiet – staff writer Idoru Wellman had headed out muttering something about “Ginger & Jack, and four or five Feminax”. After the door closed, I stopped sorting through pictures of the W-Hat spiders at the Neva Naughty noobie orgy room and the unemployed bot flock who were heading over to Google’s Lively world, and considered rewriting the story that had gone *poof* when Second Life froze my MacBook Pro -again- but decided that story could wait.
Running SL while writing was a lame move – but I’ve been trying to stay positive and made a silly mistake. The first rule of SL journalism for Mac users is save early and often. For well over a year, I’ve known the odds of crashing rise quickly after 20 minutes in-world. These sorts of challenges may account for the less than stellar quality of metaverse journalism – along with excessive Linden Kool-Aid consumption on the part of certain members of the fourth estate.
Still, even generally reliable friends of the Lab seem to be dropping not-so veiled hints lately. Ex-Linden staffer Hamlet Au interrupts his latest ode to the transcendent wonders of virtuality in New World Notes to observe his pleasure was curtailed by a crash. Imagine that! Meanwhile, Tateru Nino at Massively connects the dots and notices how the Linden Lab PR machine flew into turbo-assisted overdrive in response to Google’s announcement of Lively – an avatar-based chat embedded in web pages.
What does it all mean? Nothing good for the Lab – that seems clear. Google’s desire to own all advertising revenue on the Internet is no secret, and this places them in conflict with Linden Lab in a struggle to define the next new media.
Back in June of 2006 when Philip Linden threw the doors to the metaverse open with unlimited unverified free accounts, did he realize that he had set course for an inescapable end-game for Second Life as a 3D advertising wonderland? Despite the mother of all hypervent hype waves, the corporate crowd eventually realized that 3D dookie ice cream advertislands do not have much of an impact – even if if Ben and Jerry resort to locking players inside the immersive ad. If 3D spaces for advertisements are not compelling – or at least not yet – what is Google up to?
With Lively, Google is marrying the sticky nature of avatar-mediated social chat spaces with an ad medium that is well understood – the web-based display ad. By placing the immersive social space inside a web page, Google can use the web page screen real estate to show the ads that pay the bills without waiting for easy to ignore, slow to rez, blurry textures to load in the 3D space. The web pages frame the 3D space, so the ads are never behind the viewers’ back. By adopting the basic design of an ad-supported web site – ads at the top, bottom, and down the sides, content in the middle – Lively can easily tap into a well understood model for monetizing the experience.
Even better, Google can mine the text chat stream of any Lively participants that visit the spaces for clues about what sorts of ads to display around the border of the page. Having perfected this sort of creepy/faux-helpful mining of intention from Gmail, would you expect anything less from a company the felt it necessary to adopt the informal motto “don’t be evil”?
What of Second Life?
In it’s current unstable perpetual beta test state, Second Life at best acts as a tableau for synthetic porn creation and small group chats – a place where role players don super-cute or stud-muffin avatars. This does not seem like the future of education or serious business. The vast majority of the players are not content creators, scripters, or land barons, so the features that might differentiate Second Life from Lively over the long run are unimportant to many players.
Even worse, free, ad-supported services mean platforms that deliver the most eyes win in the end, and being able to drive people to the platform is very important — a situation that must give the Second Life leadership pause as they contemplate all the places where Google is hardwired into the Internet experience. Given Second Life’s inability to scale beyond 50-60,000 concurrent players, Lively is likely to become a deadly threat to the long-term viability of Linden Lab by reaching critical mass faster and killing the dreams of future ad revenue that sustain the Lab’s investors.
What can the Lab do? Embedding the SL viewer inside web pages is an obvious “me-too” measure, but with seemingly intractable client stability problems, a broken digital right management system that fails to protect content creators, and a shopworn media image, the Lab is looking at a long difficult road.
If the leadership at Linden Lab is serious about participating in the development of the 3D Internet, the first step would be to fix the client crashes that have been a central part of the metaverse experience for the last several years. The residents have been screaming about this for ages. Failing that, I’d suggest Mitch, Philip, and the rest of the gang continue their involvement in the new media by purchasing stock in Google.
derp
Jul 19th, 2008
YOU SCREWED UP YOUR MASSIVELY LINKS. FIX THEM AND LEARN TO PROOFREAD OR HIRE AN EDITOR WHO DOESN’T PICK PAPERCLIPS OUT OF HIS ASSCRACK INSTEAD OF EDITING YOUR DYING BLOG.
General Drama
Jul 19th, 2008
Ah fantastic idea for encouraging premium memberships: free accounts would be subject to ads on the client, you pay premium to avoid them….
melefactor seven
Jul 19th, 2008
“Back in June of 2006 when Philip Linden threw the doors to the metaverse open with unlimited unverified free accounts…”
STUPIDEST MISTAKE EVER!
BAN THE BOTS!
Alyx Stoklitsky
Jul 19th, 2008
“Ah fantastic idea for encouraging premium memberships: free accounts would be subject to ads on the client, you pay premium to avoid them….”
Open sourcing the client pretty much kills that.
General Drama
Jul 19th, 2008
lol Alyx, all LL has to do is a) include that in the OS code, and b) give a cut of the ad revenue to OS client developers who leave that code active. Obviously anybody who would turn away free money has an ulterior agenda that shouldn’t be trusted…. who knows what sort of AIDS is in such clients…
JimBean
Jul 19th, 2008
“my MacBook Pro”
Oh. So you’re the nitwit who wrote the Panther article.
What a moron.
Jumpman Lane
Jul 19th, 2008
Damn if Lively didnt make an the Lindens about face the official muttering coming out of the Lab! One day we residents are weirdos & tards told to expect less & less. (Mitch the Drip). Now we’re valued and the Lab is gonna fix everything! (Big M). Google is tryin to eat their their lunch (Lively…Second Life hehehehe). I’m just hopin the Lindens dont end up being squishy punks gettin beat alla round the playground! WE MAKIN PORN HERE!
ProFessUh Fleb
Jul 20th, 2008
“Damn if Lively didnt make an the Lindens about face the official muttering coming out of the Lab! One day we residents are weirdos & tards told to expect less & less. (Mitch the Drip). Now we’re valued and the Lab is gonna fix everything! (Big M). Google is tryin to eat their their lunch (Lively…Second Life hehehehe). I’m just hopin the Lindens dont end up being squishy punks gettin beat alla round the playground! WE MAKIN PORN HERE!”
WHAT?!?!?! Can anyone interpret this?
Marc Woebegone
Jul 22nd, 2008
Lively ROCKS!
Yarrel Fox
Jul 22nd, 2008
“a broken digital right management system that fails to protect content creators”
Yes, the crashy, laggy, porn-infested, largely empty, griefer-strewn world of SL will start turning a profit for poorly conceived and executed corporate and would-be corporate incursions that add as much value as a public domain clipart texture if only DRM is added to their work on the way to people’s graphics cards.
It’s worked so well for the music industry after all. Nobody copies music any more and nobody hates the corporations that have dragged children and grandparents through the courts because they couldn’t be bothered trying to sell people what they want in a way they want.
Stop calling for Linden to make Zunes and start helping them make iPods.
Jumpman Lane
Jul 22nd, 2008
shut up professor turdball. it means that!
Gareth Wonfor
Jul 23rd, 2008
Have you actually tried to use Google Lively?…it is very limited and appears not to work properly for a large percentage of users currently (the ‘joining room’ problem)…. personally i was seriously underwhelmed by lively and while i can see that embedded 3d space has real potential it doesn’t come close to SL currently.
At the end of the day embedding 3d into ‘flat’ pages only has value in the here and now..surely the future is a truly ’3d’ cyberspace not 3d embedded into pages..
Gareth
Afroduck
Jul 23rd, 2008
I tried Lively a while back. After spending about 20 minutes trying to figure out the ‘joining room…’ problem I got lucky and was actually logged in on a third try. I then proceeded to a room with a pool and spent the next 10 minutes trying to move from one end of the lag-infested room to the other using the ridiculous movement system (once I actually discovered HOW you move) only to find no place to get in, much less block it. The main feature of this room is a pool that eats up half the space and you can’t even get in. By that point my frustration and exasperation were enough that I had the strong urge to flood the place with screaming spengbab cubes and never return. Except you can’t just make objects there. Great.
At least it does seem to have LL alert again. Maybe we can get something done.
Witness X
Jul 24th, 2008
They should call it “Deathly”. Nothing moves. You can’t make anything, affect anything, go anywhere else once you’re in a room (leaving the room is the equivalent of logging off). Your avatar’s appearance comes from a tiny file folder of possible options. It barely functions, and represents absolutely zero threat to Linden Lab.