Metanomics: Interview with There.com CEO Michael Wilson
This evening another Metanomics session was on, this time with the CEO of There.com, Michael Wilson. It turned out to be a quite interesting interview as we learned Michael Wilson’s view of things. Unfortunately there weren’t many people in the Metanomics backchannel who shared his opinion.
But for the setting maybe: The actual interview was conducted by Robert Bloomfield from Cornell in There.com and streamed live from there (or There) to Second Life and to SLCN.tv (should be up there shortly).
So my main impression from this interview was that the important thing in There.com is earning money and doing marketing. Earning money of course for the companies and There themselves. People exploring There.com at the same time as the interview was on also supported this view. Somebody said that you not even can hit your nose without paying for it.
Creativity
And I think at no time during this interview the word “creativity” was used in terms of residents being creative. All it was about wa s mainly the companies coming in and how the platform can help them to market their stuff.
Important for him is also the approval process which you have to go through (and pay for) if you want to put an item you have created in the world. There.com has a page for this with a lot of item types with different prices. While there are a lot to choose from the list is not endless though and thus it does from the start not allow for really new objects or ideas to be realized.
Thus creativity seems not to be really encouraged. One good thing is though that you can create objects in your favourite 3d modelling tool and upload them. Then again this is only useful for people who know how to use such tools and thus preventing from “average” people to become content creators.
Michael Wilson said that this approval process is important though because it protects companies as you can prevent copyright infringements that way. That’s of course true but it surely comes with a price (literally) here.
Marketing
Michael Wilson was stressing this point all over. Because of the absence of flying body extensions and copyright infringements companies can have much control over their environments making There.com well suited for them. There.com also helps companies to find the right spot and probably give them all sorts of different support.
Numbers
No numbers 
Robert Bloomfield was talking about how good it would be to have usage numbers from all those virtual worlds platforms so that companies can compare and choose the right one. While Linden Lab publishes extensive reports regularly, Michael Wilson said that there are no plans to do so for There.com. He only mentioned that they have more than 1 million users. He also said that he might give that information out to companies who ask him.
One number is good though and this is the amount of people who can be in the same location at the same time. Not sure how they achieve it but I guess it’s also due to the approval process and the limit amount of objects available in general.
Interoperability
I was proposing in the backchannel to ask him about interoperability and also suggested an answer like “People do like Walled Gardens”. Robert Bloomfield was then asking this question later on (not because he read the backchannel but because it was on his list anyway) and we actually got to hear that answer.
Michael Wilson said that no customer never ever asked for interoperability. My problem was though that I wasn’t really sure who he meant with “customer”. Companies who want to do marketing or There.com residents? Somehow I never heard the word “customer” from Linden Lab.
He also said that he would not know how interoperability should look like, giving again the usual example that it would make no sense to put a There.com avatar into World of Warcraft. This is true but WoW is a game and not a virtual world and it also does not need to be an avatar but simply my profile, friendslist, groups etc.
Even transferring goods would make sense so that I don’t have to recreate everything again in every virtual world. Of course those 3d models then need to be the same but maybe we will have different forms and levels of interoperability anyway.
The other thing with interoperability is that you maybe shouldn’t wait until your customer ask for it because then it might be too late. The internet world is going decentral in general and thus I think Linden Lab is definitely on a better track here.
Privacy
Michael Wilson was asked about which data they store and distribute to their customers (being the companies here). He said that they store quite a bit (IIRC) but respect the privacy of their residents and don’t give all this data over to the companies. He didn’t really say in which form they analyze it and hand over. He also didn’t say that they delete the data again at some point.
To me and others this did not sound too good even if he says he respects privacy. Who knows what he decides to do tomorrow and what does “respecting privacy” actually mean?
Summary
All in all Michael Wilson did not convince me that There.com is a worthwhile place to put my time into. At least not as a resident, maybe as a company. But even then There.com seems to be very Web1.0, dividing producers and consumers. The internet seems to go in another direction though. This becomes clear when you look at sites like YouTube, flickr and others or even look at the pretty successful virtual world Second Life (he was criticizing Robert for too much mentioning Second Life, btw).
I also think for doing marketing in the future, a platform like There.com might not be well suited. Right now companies might believe in control and all that but this will become more and more a impossible to achieve.
Also community wise I am not sure how this might work out. It seems residents in There.com are mostly food for marketing companies. It also seems that they are pretty irrelevant in the thinking of Michael Wilson. It does not seem about creativity, freedom and so on. And compare this to Philip Rosedale and you have a difference which couldn’t be bigger.
And let’s think about a possible future scenario: OpenSim has grown substantially, more and more businesses have started to use it to build alternative grids, Linden Lab has finished their first version of their interoperability protocol, theoretically and practically linking all those grid together. Growth might be quite substantial, too. Corporations might choose to host their own internet or even external marketing grid with more or less loose links to the rest of the grids. Now where will the people be? In this mega-grid or in There.com?
Thus companies might reconsider and maybe forget about control for a moment. Think also of Coca Cola who already allowed to use their brand in Second Life even for commercial products being made with it. This is the right way and I expect to see more of this in the future. Michael Wilson might reconsider, too.
Technorati Tags: secondlife, metanomics, there.com, interoperability
February 26th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Maybe the reason you have the impression that “the important thing in There.com is earning money and doing marketing” is because he was the interview was geared towards Michael Wilson talking about the ‘Four Rivers of Revenue’… http://metanomics.net/
Though the user content process can seem quite a bit limiting, it doesn’t take much time inside of There to realize that the membership is extremely creative. And if you spend a little more time than that, you’ll see that the staff at There.com works very closely with the membership in encouraging and helping them by creating developer tools.
The point of the interview was not to convince you that it’s worthwhile to be a resident, but to talk about There.com’s business model.
February 26th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Great summary.
One slightly incomplete section was Wilson’s stance on interoperability. I agree, over all he seemed cold to the thought of an avatar and their in-world belongings being able to travel from one world to the next. He did mention that he supported some sort of universal ID or pass, allowing one’s RL identity & account information to travel from one world to the next. I believe he mentioned a sort of universal login applicable from one world to the next.
This does make sense, and maybe it is a good first step, however I do disagree with his stated logic behind it. I don’t believe he truely understands his customers (individual users of the world). I believe there are many individuals (including me) that would love to take their avatars on a trek across multiple Virtual Worlds.
February 26th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
I suspect Cathy is right…there is a lot more creativity going on in There than the show indicated. I would love to have a show interviewing people in There who are actively involved in community-building, live events, fashion and other forms of entrepreneurship.
Cathy, any ideas for guests? Self-nomination is definitely allowed! Drop me a line at rjb9@cornell.edu….or perhaps I will see you There.
Rob/Beyers
February 26th, 2008 at 10:03 pm
Thanks for the correction, Ninoramai. Unfortunately I was a bit distracted in RL when he talked about this. I think he mentioned OpenID but I wasn’t really clear what his plans there are.
And I am also definitely somebody who would like to have it easier to find existing friends in new networks/world and being able to port profile information etc. (if I decide to do so).
@Cathy thanks for your view on There.com. I only was in there quickly today but maybe need to spend some more time there. But it’s good to hear from others what they think is good about There. I don’t think though it’s the ideal world for me because as I understand it you always need to pay to create something, even if it’s just for fun. As I mostly create things for fun than selling it seems a bit limiting to me. But of course others might have different opinions about that.
I am definitely looking forward to maybe having some more Metanomics events also in There.com, so go for it, Beyers!
February 26th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
I haven’t spent too much time in There, but I agree with Cathy’s point, and it’s a point that can be made about the revised EA-Land (Sims Online) as well. People who yield some of their freedom of creativity to the company may find ultimately they have more freedom to preserve their IP and their income from copyleft hackers and copyright thieves. Freedom to create can’t be kept in a social vacuum; it needs protection.
The idea of having a portable suitcase of ready-made ID with passwords and credit card info etc, a kind of passport, is very different than interoperability. When the wild-eyed geeks talk about interop, they talk about walking between worlds literally with your avatar, not just having convenient sign-up procedures.
As for everything else you’re saying, Tao, as usual, I’d have to disagree with just about all of it, and point out once again that it is merely one very extremist school of thought about how the future of the Internet and its various media “should be”.
I think particularly on the matter of privacy, you’re hammering on the wrong nails here, and to you, every capitalist advertising-driven mass culture venture will look like a nail.
I’ll bet you don’t care as much about privacy when it comes to enthusing about Katherine’s AJAX browser accessing SL — through my password and access to my money, let’s say. There, the technical innovation is all you care about. You don’t care about the Sheep sucking up avatar proximity data, or making search opt-out as they once did. There, you only care about technical innovation. You weren’t around to complain about Scoble taking 5,000 Facebook friend lists and putting them on Plaxo that I could see, because you want “interoperability” and “open standards”. It shouldn’t be a crime, eh? And when I say “you,” I mean not only you personally, but this extremist open-source culture that you represent in SL, in which you whine about walled gardens and proprietary software, but suddenly find time for privacy if its for the sake of *paying for* these things in actuality.
Suddenly, when it comes to a company, under a TOS which binds them, gathering demographic data to sell advertising just like a newspaper would gather from subscribers, you blush and faint and begin to whine about “privacy”. I find it terribly hypocritical. We need privacy from other people in these worlds, far more than from the companies. Sure, it’s good to get all fired up and call the ACLU about age verification. You weren’t as fiered up about light-weight browser that could suck every single transaction data out of my log-on session and harvest, mine, and hold it on a website. It’s as if some transformative process occurs if the entity is doing this is an annoined “start-up” and now an old-media “wind-down”.
http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/02/the-road-to-the.html
February 26th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
That’s not true. I do care about the privacy problems of that AJAX browser (and this is why I never used it) and I do care about all the analytics tools which collect all sorts of data without telling anybody (I also wrote about that already).
I am also no fan of targeted ads how technical cool the solution might be because they always have privacy implications I don’t necessarily like.
And because of that I propose to companies to go other ways like more community interaction, starting conversations and so on. Permission Marketing instead of Interrupt Marketing.
Regarding Scoble I was aware of the problems it created and I take it seriously and I tried to make the points of all three parties (Scoble, contacts and Facebook) clear. And I also point out that this is why the Data Portability Group is so important. Not for the technical bits but for the policy bits. One claim is “control” and this is about “controlling my data”.
February 26th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
There.com and Second Life do share a very common trait. You really need to dig around and give each a fair shot before you make a call on which virtual world is right for you. Go into both with an open mind, spend at least a few weeks in each. I know for a fact even after 3 months in Second Life that I’ve barely scratched the surface. The same is true for There.com
@Christian: You’re very correct, if you log into Second Life to create things on a whim, There.com most likely isn’t the place for you.
@Robert: Thank you. I’ll get a list together and drop you an email
February 27th, 2008 at 3:26 am
Tao, if you cared, you never blogged about it as enthusiastically as you are blogging about this sort of privacy issue. You never critiqued the Sheep. You never wrote about these things. Perhaps I failed to see a blog entry about data collecting, it’s not your norm.
Tao, I used to go around spouting mantras about communities too. But after seeing lots of fake communities and lame content, I’m given great pause. I see also that things that everybody even likes like Pontiac’s island in SL don’t have traction, don’t have a recipe to keep the company, or frankly, the residents, either.
“Starting conversations” and “permission marketing” sound like terribly chic new buzz phrases. What is the content and field testing underneath them?
The Data Portability Group wants to…port data. There’s a simpler way: don’t port it. It’s ok not to. The future viability of worlds may depend on it.
March 26th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
Heyy I Dont no how to watch the vid
March 26th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
The video is available here:
http://slcn.tv/metanomics-here-and-there
You need the recent Quicktime player to play it.
March 26th, 2008 at 9:10 pm
The link to the March 24th show on CosmoGirl! in There is also available now. Take a look at http://metanomics.net/25-mar-2008/recap-cosmogirl-there-and-marketing-virtual-worlds.
March 27th, 2008 at 1:02 am
“You really need to dig around and give each a fair shot before you make a call on which virtual world is right for you. Go into both with an open mind, spend at least a few weeks in each.”
I’d love to, but There only supports Windows, and hence are only of concern to me to the extent that they may undermine virtual worlds that are, shall we say, interoperable in the sense of not forcing one to choose a particular OS.
April 5th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
While I won’t claim to support “There’s” recent focus on attracting large companies into There.com, business is business and if they don’t pay the bills then everything else they might do is a mute point.
As a very long time resident of There, I can say that most techie type people misunderstand what creativity is to the average person. The majority of people that join these types of worlds do not either have the skill, time or desire to learn how to produce 3d content, custom programming or whatever. They just want to express themselves. In real life, the vast majority of us do not learn how to make furniture, houses or other things. We express our creativity by focusing on how to integrate various objects, colors, etc into groups that present a scene that provides us comfort, functionality and security.
Just like in SL, every member that spends time refining the look of their avatar, arranging different objects into scenes, etc is being creative. The main difference in There versus SL is simplicity. “There’s” original designs were to allow the average person to express themselves with very little skill required. I am not trying to start a debate on this aspect, but while SL allows almost unlimited options, that complexity cannot just be hidden from the average person, it exists and it can be overwhelming.
Anyone that takes the time to travel around “There”, just like SL will see creativity everywhere they go. Restricting the definition of creativity to only those that can climb the hurdles of modern technologies, graphic art, programming and 3d modelling is leaving out 98% of the population that still want and need to be creative in some form. Content developers in SL, There or any other place produce that content primarily to allow the majority to express their creativity through the use of that content.
While I have no idea where “There” or SL will be in 3 years, I feel fairly safe in saying that the eventual mass market is about providing the average person the ability to be creative and expressive without a major learning requirement. Content creation will always be limited to a subset of the majority that have the skill, desire and time to do so.
“There’s” strengths were always it’s unique look, it’s world model, the small learning requirement, avatar communication, simple methods to express ‘your’ space and the sense of presence it provides when communicating with other people.
April 5th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
I’m really grateful for Meret’s post. This is a really great insight. People are more creative than snarky geeks and professional creators give them credit for. The concept of “user-generated content” must be expanded to include the rearranging of other’s content by the individual consumer.