Tim Oren's Due Diligence

Cargo Culting in Virtual Reality

The latest Wired zine has a couple of insightful articles by Frank Rose on the fate of advertising in 3D video games and in Second Life. Since only the piece on Second Life is online, I'll use it to make the point. After reviewing disappointing user numbers in 2L (good for VR, three orders of magnitude below the Web), and the misadventures of some naive BigCo marketers hoping to cash in on its cachet, Rose comes round to his point:

"... the kind of digital marketing that actually works requires a conceptual leap. Successful online marketing is targeted and specific, like direct mail — but it's direct mail in a fun house, where the recipients can easily seize control of what the mail says, where it goes next, and how it gets there. You need to know how to buy up keywords to maximize search returns, how to make the most of recommendation engines, how to use the viral potential of Web video, how to monitor what's being said in blogs and message boards, how not to blow it by trying to be deceptive. Building a corporate pavilion in Second Life doesn't require any of these things. It's simple and it's obvious."

How tempting to forego the hard slogging and organizational transformation required to truly market in the digital domain, and instead hope that a literalist recreation of real life inside the machine will also recreate the old selling and buying patterns. This is an odd 21st century form of cargo cult in which the priests of old media marketing hope that simulacra of their old familiar world will bring them some valuable virtual payloads. In vain. VR is really an image of Faerie, not reality, and its denizens transport themselves to where the crowds and fun are gathered, bypassing the digital billboards and wannabe commercial pavilions and plazas. The price of successful marketing there is creating fun, not building virtual real estate.

As usual, the lunch is not free. The organizational change and trauma required to actually create and be fun are probably as severe as those required to become responsive to the demands of the Web based market. And for the pain of the latter you reach an audience with three more zeros in the number, and might actually deliver some value to those that become customers.

Though it's a thrill to finally see the combination of hardware and software virtuosity that make consumer VRs possible, there's a parallel argument to the above to be made at the platform level. Enthralled by the imagery, myth (Snowcrash, Neuromancer, et. al.) and technical sweetness of it all, financiers and engineers have over-invested in 3D worlds, hoping that a simulacrum of reality will summon up real users. And so it has, but in insufficient numbers to rise beyond the niche level.

Maybe it's time to call this a dead end, except for demonstrations of technical prowess. Outside the wannabe worlds, the virtual and real are becoming coextensive, one mobile device, WiFi hub, digicam and GPS receiver at a time. Gibson aside, the digital image of the first decade of the 21st century isn't a set of VR goggles, it's the white wires of iPod earbuds. The interpenetration of the electronic fabric with reality, giving it a tinge of magic, is the actual direction of change.

Update: There's a lengthy and well-informed discussion at Chris Anderson's blog. Other than being Mr. Long Tail, he's also the editor of Wired, and commissioned the piece by Frank Rose cited above.

More on Japan Demographics

Further to my previous post mentioned the demographic imperative for development of robotics in Japan, here's a survey article from the Economist on the general topic of Japanese demographics. The population pyramid charts are quite remarkable, bearing in mind that while continuation of the current birth rate trends aren't guaranteed, that's the best bet. Even the 40+ year-out chart is better than half a done deal already.

The article digs beyond the obvious eldercare and pensions implications to issues such as how to downsize cities and towns, and the political impact of pensions becoming the #1 issue. That last point at least sounds familiar. And while I don't know enough about Japanese politics to know whether pensions were a driving issue, the ruling LDP did take a hammering in Upper House elections this past week.

Point of View in Social Network Analysis

One useful attribute for categorizing social network analytical systems is their inherent point of view. This is similar to (of all things) the domain of computer games, where we talk about first-person games - e.g, shooters, or Myst-like puzzles or adventures - and third-person, omniscient view games - often strategy, simulation or other god games. Of course there are also variants - e.g., intelligence and fog of war rules in otherwise omniscient view games - and combinations, such as the ability to change POV in some virtual worlds.

Any social network analysis has a POV structure. Some approach their domain from a 3rd person, omniscient view requiring visibility over an entire network or a very large sample of it. This is the dominant trend in the virtual domain, given its obvious advantage in completeness of knowledge, whether the domain is international phone calling patterns, visualizing online social networks, or modeling information sources and influence in an enterprise.

If you can get this information, you will use it. But often it may be inaccessible, for reasons varying from privacy to sheer scale to intractable technical issues. Then one will be forced back to the first person POV, where only the connections and traffic patterns observable by a single user or other node may be considered. There seems to be considerably less work based on the acceptance of this limit. For instance, Barry Wellman, a pioneer in SNA, has described face to face interview methods to elicit information regarding personal or 'ego-centered' networks. This has some obvious issues in the virtual world, or at scale.

A MIT student project of danah boyd's looked at issues of identity fragmentation by analyzing personal e-mail collections (PDF). A demonstration visualization system based on software by Jeff Potter was created, but it was apparently limited to a gallery installation and was not further analyzed for utility and usability. (BTW, I should here acknowledge that parts of danah's paper anticipate parts of my own analysis of privacy issues from 2005, though I was unaware of it at the time. Her 'facets' are almost exactly what I called 'compartments', and our takes on related privacy and intrusion implications are also very similar. Interesting, considering we approached the problem from quite different starting points.)

Scalable, deployed systems taking a first person POV approach to SNA seem lacking in the commercial, academic and open source worlds. Have I missed something? Comments and trackbacks are open (for a while) if you have a clue to relate.

[Update: To clarify, I'm not interested in public data sets that might obviate the need for taking a first person POV in some cases, but in theories, methodologies and systems that deal with cases when there's no option but to take the ego-centric approach to SNA. This note really belongs in comments, but that part of typepad seems to be hosed - again :( ]

Update 2: Here's another 1P paper (PDF) from 2004, describing an ego-centric analysis of e-mails to discriminate between spam and non-spam messages. I doubt the method described would work as well any more, as the nature of spam headers has changed in the intervening time as part of that arms race.

Could Your Next Temp Be A Bot?

If you're in Japan, maybe. From the curiously named Pink Tentacle blog comes a report of a temporary labor agency buying a small batch of Mitsubishi's Wakamaru semi-humanoid robots. They will apparently be tasked to escort visitors to offices to their destinations, and can play music and carry on some sort of conversation using a 10,000 word vocabulary while wheeling along beside the guest. R. Daneel it's not, but it may chip a few tasks off the usual Office Lady functions in a Japanese office.

The chances of these fine yellow fellows turning up in the U.S. at this point are minimal. Japan is dealing with an increasing labor shortage issue due to a less than replacement birth rate. Here, the native reproduction rate is near equilibrium and the population is still growing due to immigration, legal and illegal. We also seem to be more willing to change business social conventions over time. Being escorted by an OL is still de riguer in Japan. In the Valley an admin only comes down to greet you if you are visited someone rather senior; juniors can fetch their guests themselves.

The packaging might have trouble here as well. Kawaii plays well in Japan, and crosses cultures with anime and other entertainment products, but I'd hazard the style would not be well received in American business. However, both cuteness and anthropomorphism are continuing themes in Japanese robotics, from the original Aibo to Asimo to other bots for routine office tasks. Consciously or not, the Japanese are spending a lot of effort at making bots 'socially acceptable' in every day life. This is a demographic necessity. Unable to cover the need with immigrants, Japan will face a huge eldercare problem in a very few years. If it's to avoid cannibalizing the dwindling pool of workers to care for the elderly, then it must make delivery of a portion of care by bots acceptable to those who had no exposure to them in their previous life.

Japan faces an irreversible forcing function that requires progress in bots that can interact and dwelll alongside humans. The particular packaging that results may or may not work well elsewhere in the world, but the functionality that is developed will certainly be exportable.

Via Global Voices

Reality Creep

It's a truism that for each of us, our sense of 'normal' derives from the world in which we were children. We are variously good at adapting to changes throughout our lives, but we are never so much a native as in the physical and cultural landscape of our birth, including the technologies we grew up with. As we age away from our comfortable sense of normal, new generations come forth who are natives in their dealings with technologies that we perforce adopted as adults. They have an internalized and integrated grasp of things we came to explicitly and piece-meal. Our realities in dealing with technology and social and information systems built from it are fundamentally different.

High technology has been in the hands of mass audiences long enough for this reality creep to become a significant issue for designers and marketers. The Internet has been mainstream for over a decade, the personal computer for 25 years, and consumer electronics at various levels for longer. When we talk about literalism vs. magic in design, the dividing line is not fixed. Taking my definition of 'literalism' from the earlier post: "those elements in an interface design that transfer more-or-less directly from experiences in the real world", the "real" is not constant and it includes technology and the virtual for those generations that have experienced them, in addition to the physical and natural worlds.

To take one example from my past, about twenty years ago the first synchronized audio and slide shows using HyperCard on the Mac sputtered into life. As this was years prior to the advent of QuickTime, the code and interfaces were hand tooled. In common with others developing early multimedia on the Mac and other platforms, we appropriated and used the iconic reverse/stop/start/pause/forward controls already common on VCRs and audio tape players. I can't recall any deep discussion of the decision at the time, and I also don't recall any usability issues associated with transplanting these controls from the physical world onto a computer screen. Clearly, by 1986-7 the notion of user control over time-based media was already a well-established part of the 'real' which we could appropriate literally, along with the consensus means of controlling it. Given the lack of negative comebacks, it's dubious that users felt any 'magical' part to that interface element (save perhaps those sophisticates who knew how hard it was to make work at all given the hardware of the time).

Flash forward twenty years. What's now the installed base of 'reality' with respect to time based media, to continue the example? We can certainly include the ubiquitous onscreen program guide. Timeshifting media, at first with VCRs and now with DVRs, is a commonplace. A present day designer could simply appropriate these elements and others as part of the 'real', so far as most users are concerned. This installed base of habit is one of the enablers for the adoption velocity of YouTube and similar services.

What about business oriented systems, most notably the venerable desktop? There the gap between 'reality' at the time of initial design and that pertaining today has become obvious. How long has it been since business was primarily conducted with formal paper documents, ending their days filed in folders? I'd venture that many of the dot-com generation have pursued their careers without yet seeing an inter-departmental envelope in the wild (not that they've missed anything). 'Reality' has become a swirl of e-mails, discussion threads, and blips of IMs. We're internalizing heretofore 'magical' notions like backtracks, bookmarks and search (and also evil counterparts like spam). It's not hard to make an argument that the ossified desktop has reached its disutility point, not only in terms of scale, but in failing to reflect and exploit the native reality of most of its current users.

Loafing on the Eastern Shore

So where have I been hiding out? Partly just summer loafing, some work on a project that might or might not surface publicly, and a family trip to the East Coast. We visited my wife's people on Long Island, then drove down the coast to visit my brothers' families near Williamsburg. While dealing with NYC and New Jersey Turnpike traffic didn't feel like much improvement on the airport hassles at the time, once we got down to the Delmarva area we deliberately went off the beaten path.

Pleasant Postini News

One of the more upbeat Monday mornings in a while, as Google acquires Postini, one of Pacifica's portfolio companies. We've been in the deal since 2001, so there's a quite nice multiple, let's say.

I'm currently on the Pacific Time announcement phone conference, and will liveblog anything that stands out. (Off now. I've integrated with my own thoughts below. Pretty routine Q&A, with one good question about implications of this on a Google security strategy, badly needed for enterprise class offerings.)

Google is positioning this deal straight in its enterprise facing line of business, which has been somewhat of a fifth wheel until recently. The contribution to the company's value of a small search appliance line and announced, but not yet widely deployed, enterprise applications hasn't been large. Google is specifically saying this buy is a 'marker' (my term) to indicate their seriousness in the enterprise space.

(More after the break...)