Now, I’ve read dozens of “white papers” claiming to be guides to Second Life and other virtual spaces and most of them get mocked and tossed into the circular file here at the Intellahome but, as much as I would have liked to claim that “even O’Reilly doesn’t get it!” I can’t. This is a great white paper.   It’s actually useful! *gasp!* I know! You probably think I’ve lost my marbles, but listen up.

If you’re someone who needs to make the argument to your company or organization for a foray into the virtual, this little baby will actually give you some really decent ammunition: non-inflated demographic and population stats, useful information about money exchanges and purchasing habits, and context for Second Life as one of many new virtual spaces that should be on your radar. It even has a fair assessment of adult content in Second Life that neither glosses over risk or over-hypes it like some of the conservative press has tried to.

It’s worth a read.

Disclaimer: I should note that I did get my copy of the report for free though I would still have been happy to trash it if it deserved it. You can’t buy Intellalove

So, being the nutsy person that I am, I couldn’t help but run off and download the VLES software and make myself an avatar. It was, needless to say, very interesting. I had the choice of about five haircuts in five natural colors (so disappointing for us pink-haired folks), about a hundred clothing options, skin color, and the choice of five celebrity faces. I chose “The Portman” because “The Ricci” had anime-sized eyes. I could choose my height but there was no slider for body shape. Everyone is eating-disorder-skinny in VLES.

Here’s my avatar in her Herby Hancock tank top and red Joan Jett haircut.

She’s “like sooo New York! OMG!” When I logged in I was surprised to see that VLES was announcing that CSS (that Brazilian band who sings the song about music on the new Ipod commercials) would be playing.

Log-in screen with concert announcement and menu for choosing the club you’d like to pop in to.

It’s grungy; it’s emo; it’s an opportunity to market to a self-selected audience of people who like virtual worlds, socializing, and new music. In my opinion, VLES is a pretty good idea. But will it work?

According to the Facebook blog:

“Engaging with businesses and buying things are part of your everyday life. Advertising doesn’t have to be about interrupting what you’re doing, but getting the right information about the purchases you make when you want it. We believe we’ve created a system where ads are more relevant and actually enhance Facebook. “

This is radical thinking in the world of marketing and advertising. But before I explain why let me give you a little case study/example of how this will work.

Bob has a Facebook profile and adds an application for, say, Amazon. Every time Bob adds a book to his wish list on Amazon an item goes into his News Feed announcing “Bob just added Brain Surgery for Dummies to his Wishlist” and all of his friends are notified. When they click on the feed they’re connected to Bob’s page and then to Amazon to see the book and are offered a discount on the book because they arrived through Bob’s recommendation. (Please note that not all Facebook advertisers will be offering discounts etc. but it would be nice!) Maybe Bob gets a nickel off his next order for every friend who purchased one of his recommended books.

It’s a pretty straight forward recommendation advertising scheme already in use on lots of sites. But here’s the kicker. There’s a difference between going to Amazon, for example, and clicking on “What my friends are buying” and having that same information delivered to you in another space, your social network.

There are a couple big ideas in play here:

1. The power of recommendations: We all know that we’re more likely to buy something recommended to us by a friend than based on advertising but I think it’s interesting to ponder the responsibility associated with recommending a product. How many times have you told a friend “Oh, man! That movie was so great! You HAVE to see it!”? They then see the movie and tell you “OMG! That movie sucked! I thought you had good taste!” The result? You stop recommending movies to your friend. Offering recommendations reflects not just on the product, but on the person offering the recommendation as well as on the person receiving it. “You thought I’d like that sweater?! Do you even know me?!”

2. Context of ads: It’s all about context. There’s a huge difference between someone shoving a coupon in your face as you walk down the street and the cashier saying “Did you know there’s a coupon for this? I think I have an extra one here. You’ll save a dollar.” In the first case the ad is unwelcome, even if it is for a product you’re interested in. In the second, you’re already interested in the product and you welcome the coupon. In another example, if your friend called you every day to tell you what he bought last night at Target you’d probably get annoyed. But if you were at Target and you could see a hover over products that said “Your friend Bob loves this soap!” you’d probably be grateful (or at least understand why Bob smells like Lavender and Honey all the time). Context determines whether an ad is welcome and helpful or annoying and obtrusive. The question is are ads from friends on Facebook welcome or intrusive?

I have to conclude that the level of intrusion and the power of the recommendation depends on who the friend is and how often they shove recommendations in your face. So, will you be a Facebook ad-whore or will you reject them and reject the friends who use them? Will you be able to ignore the ads like you would a sidebar ad or a banner ad? Do you think this kind of advertising is useful? powerful?

What Social Networks can learn:
Be straightforward and transparent: Tell users what you’re going to do with any information they provide on the site. Be clear about policies and procedures. Don’t bury details in a hard-to-read TOS and expect people to find them.
Take criticism: Apologize when your site or your staff do things that make users upset and STOP the practice immediately. A bug shouldn’t function for a minute more than you know about it. Take your site down if you have to but don’t let a bad idea or a mistake become a PR nightmare.
The only invites should be personal invites: Online trust relationships are difficult to establish at best whether they’re between people or between users and a site. Automated invites are meaningless. Don’t send an invite to a user’s contact unless the user has been asked (or at least allowed) to send a personal message along with the invitation.

What Social Network users can learn:
Research a site before you join: Unless the invite you receive is personalized assume it’s spam and check up on the site, send an email to the person who invited you, and do a quick search for stories related to the site.
Screw-ups happen: The internet moves fast. Great ideas can spread just as fast as bad ideas. A few years ago email viruses were the big thing. I don’t know anyone who didn’t become a victim of at least one.  I felt horrible every time I received an email from a friend who said they became victim of the Quechup mess when they signed up because the invitation came from me, someone they thought was on top of all of this. Surely, if I invited them it must be a worthwhile site. Each email made me want to club further and further under my desk. Then I realized “Hey! Crap happens” I sent out as many apology messages as I could and tried to let as many people know that they should disregard the invite.
Networks are migratory: Though you may build your network on one site, if a majority of the network moves somewhere else you might follow. Some members of your network might function like scouts, going out to find the new spaces, and report back to the collective about what’s out there. I’m proud to be such a scout but there is responsibility attached to that function. I think I failed in that this time by allowing myself to be tricked by a bad site. Se la vie! We live. We learn.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m certainly not claiming that I followed this advice when I made the mistake of signing up but I’ve always believed the only bad experience is the one we don’t learn from. What insight do you take away from this mess?

Purchase, not activate.

In the store, the fourteen year old manager of the twelve year old service guy, tells me that I need to take the phone home to activate on Itunes (which I knew) and that there would be a credit check that might make me come back into the store. Never have I had to have a credit check to pay for monthly service on anything. After all, if you don’t pay they can just shut you off. Anyhow, since I couldn’t activate mine in the store we couldn’t replace Mark’s Verizon phone with another (we’re on a family plan) and so had to leave without purchasing a phone for him. After a day we decided it would just be easier for Mark to get an iphone as well (I didn’t really have to twist his arm) so we could activate them both at the same time.

I log in to Itunes, say that I want to activate two phones, keep numbers, move accounts over etc, then get a weird error message and  end up activating only my phone. Three phone calls later the AT&T folks tell me that Mark will have to come into the store to add his to my plan. So, leaving me behind with four five year olds he heads down to the mall. And again, waits in line for an inordinate amount of time just to find out that, in fact, we have to activate his over the phone. So he comes home, tries to follow the instructions they gave him and rather than adding his line to mine the software wants him to pay for a whole new plan. Not wanting to double our bill he calls AT&T who tell him that he has to come into the store again to have his credit checked even though he’ll be on my plan. Frustrated, he heads out again to a different store where he hopes the line will be shorter, talks to the ever mature staff, and comes home with an activated phone.

Three days, $1200, five trips to the AT&T store, and about ten calls to customer service and we finally have two active iPhones on the same family plan. Geesh! Why do they make it so hard to give them money? Geesh!

I will say, though, the phone is amazing. I love its intuitive interface and I’m very glad I bought it. Second, the iTunes activation is a stroke of genius. Had we not needed to add two lines to a plan etc the home activation would have saved me spending time in the hellish mall. Also, as with Mac laptops, I suggest you personalize your iphone pretty quickly so it doesn’t get picked up accidentally by someone else.  They all look the same when they’re asleep.

So without further ado, I introduce you to…..the Intellaphone!

First, let me say. Robert…Mr. Scoble…you’ve been under a lot of heat lately. I don’t want to add to that. You’ve been extremely graceful while under fire. BUT! Wow, do you miss the mark with your latest Kyte video about the “blog of the future.” Let me tell you why.

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If you don’t have time to watch the video, here’s the lowdown. Scoble says that blogs have become cluttered with ads, widgets, sidebar calendars etc. Lots of elements that take attention away from the central content of the blog. Up to this point I agree with Scoble. Then he goes TOTALLY AWRY!

Scoble suggests a blog interface where all of the sidebar bits (Facebook links, Twitter widgets etc) are relegated to “books” that zoom in and out similar to CoverFlow.

If you’ve never seen Coverflow, it looks like this:

How pretty! How very Iphone! How very useless and against the whole concept of a blog! Who are blogs for? Are they for the blogger or the reader? What Scoble describes is the ultimate personal homepage. I’d love to be able to see all my daily goodies on one easy-to-navigate page but this is not a blog. A blog faces outward to an audience. It should be easy to read, easy to navigate, and the text shouldn’t be buried in some snazzy Flash interface. My blog page isn’t perfect; there’s some junk on it but the purpose behind everything on it is to help the reader, not help me.

I know Scoble is brainstorming here and I think he has some good points but not to apply to blogs. I agree with him about the need for simplicity on the page so the content is featured but that’s about where the agreement stops. A blog should be simple, uncluttered and created solely with the reader/audience in mind.

Is it egotistical to think that readers are really dying to see your Facebook profile so easily? Or that they’re dying to be able to see your Flickr page without leaving your blog? There’s nothing wrong with linking to other iterations of your identity to allow your readers t find out more about you. Doing so contributes to your ethos and your trustworthiness but it should be subtle. Not “in your face.”

Blogs are not personal homepages. If we’re going to redefine how a blog would work best we need to keep two things in mind: 1) easy to write 2) easy to read. That’s it.

Back to the whiteboard, Scoble. Give it another shot.

Sincerely,

Intellagirl

Yes, it sits on your desktop. Yes, that can be distracting. Yes, it has all kinds of feeds that might shove info in your face that you’re not interested in. BUT! You can change all of that, customize it in really powerful and handy ways, and make it exactly what you want.

For example, mine has short cuts to all of my Office apps (which I use, oh, a MILLION times a day), my Skype connections, the local weather, my gmail, news headlines (from sources I picked), a little notepad, a feed from my Flickr photos, my RSS feeds, a to do list, and a Google search bar.

Some of the gadgets you can add are a bit silly like the one that tells your the Star Trek stardate for the day. But hey, I’m sure someone is in love with that gadget.

What I like most about it is that it really does aggregate the first four or five tabs that I open every day when I sit down at my desk. It saves me time. Yes, it actually saves me time! So much of the technology I play with is cool for about a day and then I realize that I’m not able/willing to integrate the technology into my daily routine. If you can’t make easy use of it then it doesn’t work for you and you have to move on.

My only wish for the Google Desktop is a TV plugin. I have Media Center on my machine and I have a guilty habit of watching schlock like Dr. Phil while I work. It would be lovely to have it on a little screen on my desktop sidebar. Hey, a girl can dream, right? Maybe Google knows what’s best for me and doesn’t have this little plugin to save my productivity.

Give Google Desktop a try and tell me what you think. Is it great? Is it horrible? What gadgets do you like best?