So Anthony van Zyl, managing director of Slippcat hovered above the crowd today at the Virtual Worlds conference, up there with the adults like MTV and that branding engine There.com and the guy from Habbo and his millions of teens, and it was all about how to make brands work in virtual worlds.
The tone was set by Greg Verdino from Crayon who commented that “last year I couldn’t get you to stop talking about Second Life and this year I suspect you won’t even mention them” before it veered off into an extended discussion of how to sell Pepsi to teens, how to sell music to teens, how to sell phones to teens, how to sell, well….you get the idea, although in fairness someone lobbed a question at them as the room was starting to clear, something along the lines of “yeah, but what about the adults” to which Wilson of There.com replied “oh yeah, they’re there, only different” and the Slippcat CEO showed his street cred as an adult by admitting he played Atari when he was a kid, which is to say that having once been a kid who was marketable to, he’s now equally gullible as an adult, I suppose.
Kind of like moving from Hot Wheels up the ladder to a Harley, they’re still bikes, it’s just the brands are maybe bigger and certainly more expensive.
(More after the fold)
The Marketers Want Your Brain
The afternoon case study was called “Capturing their Brains and Eyeballs” because, well, it’s not JUST about capturing their eyeballs, you need their brains as well. And that was kind of the theme at the morning session as well, where a lot of talk was on measurement, and is virtual world advertising still valid, and is there a problem when some 40 year old is a 20 year old chick in a virtual world (they’re not usually, was the response, and even when they are it’s still an extension of their ‘aspirations’ and thus somehow indicative of brand preference, although I don’t know how a 20 year old virtual chick is going to buy L’Oreal for her 40 year old male controller).
And it all came down to engagement, and how engagement is different from what advertisers usually measure, which is eyeballs, and click-throughs, and impressions, and this is where the Slippcat guy comes in because he’s proposing you can have your cake and eat it too - with the Slippcat system, he envisions virtual worlds where EVERY object is clickable (and given away for free, by the way), and every click pays the clickee, and with every click those marketers get a report, and I start to picture a brand manager as being something like those business types in a black and white film, standing over a steampunk kind of globe which spits out long slips of paper with stock quotes on them, a constant endless stream of ticker tape, curling up at your feet and eventually reaching the ceiling.
Because the brand managers are trying to measure all this. And Slippcat is promising measurement - “give us your branded objects and we’ll embed them with menus, and links to Web sites, and SLRLs to your until-now-empty sims, and as the hordes click and get paid, that little ticker tape will keep spitting out reports, and we’ll all go home happy and wealthy, even those poor saps who did all the clicking because after all, you make peanuts on Google word search but people still throw it on their site, right?”
So now you have ticker tape to make the brand managers happy, and with all these systems and measures you can figure out not just how many times your item was clicked, but by whom, and how long they STOOD by your object, and whether they shared it with their friend, and which friends, and where did they go next.
And then you have the Habbo teens, and you get all that and more - because in addition to clicks, and proximity, and measures, and object propagation numbers you also get that cross-tabbed to research data about all those clicking, happy Habbo kids, like what their favorite phone is, or what shoes they wear, or when their birthdays are, all kinds of deep market research data cross-segmenting and slicing to your heart’s content.
So you’ve got your clicks and you’ve got your demographics, now all you need is “engagement”, and this is where everyone gets slightly befuddled, because you can’t entirely measure engagement by how long someone is in a place, or how much they click on something, or how many friends they give their branded object to - because, well, engagement is something INSIDE.
Thank goodness they’re working on that, because as Michael Wilson of there.com pointed out, the neuroscientists have been looking at the issue and have discovered that there are BRAIN patterns that show when you’re engaged, so I’m assuming then that Emotiv and other systems will finally bring us the ultimate measure that all these marketers are lusting after, which is to TRULY read your brain to find out if their brand messages are making an impression.
Slippcat is Listening
Until we can run brain scans on users, Slippcat is promising to add a layer of insight on its ticker tape reports, because they’re offering “buzz reports” based on chat logs.
Hmmm. OK, so the way he described this is that Slippcat is giving out items for free (oh, and remembering the senior guy in the booth told me “the content developers in SL hate us”), with the ability to click those items and earn a few Linden dollars, and with the ability for those items to teleport you, teleport someone to you, send you off to a Web site, whatever….well, turns out those items will also know whether you LOOK at them, and how close you are to them, and also what you SAY around them. Because Slippcat is extracting “buzz words and phrases” from chat logs and passing that on to advertisers, all as part of its sincere effort to better marry brand messages to users, to never push stuff that people don’t want, and to properly calibrate advertising to your brain, or your engagement experience, or whatever it is they’re all trying to do, at some point I kind of got lost in all the buzzy talk and metric stuff and just sort of wondered “yeah, but none of this sounds like much FUN”.
MTV to the Rescue
Van Zyl played Atari as a kid. Which gave him the right to sit up there with Habbo and MTV, and which is also I guess the source of his click obsession, because what’s a clickable piece of furniture if it’s not a joystick button after all?
But the MTV gal was having none of this “free stuff, click me” model, and there were other sighs and rolling of eyes at the head table. Because as MTV said: “If it’s good stuff, people should want to PAY for it. Look…they PAY us for campaigns, and that’s the ultimate engagement”.
And even Greg from Crayon piped in, asking whether all this clickable, payable Slippcat nonsense didn’t “tarnish a brand”…in other words, is Nike really going to want to be handing out shoes that dole out a Linden or two, but I take it they didn’t read the Slippcat literature, because they’re not after Nike, apparently, they’re after Office Depot.
And it really all circles down to that. Because after all the measuring and clicking and segmenting and analyzing, everyone pretty much agreed that “if you’re going to do something, it had better be GOOD”, and that’s good news for the content creators of Second Life. Because as much as Anshe Chung has her 10L warehouse, and as much as Slippcat will end up being a sort of camping chair warehouse, there’s still something aspirational, there’s still something SPECIAL, about owning the best - and the best means authentic, and the best means hand crafted, and the best means developed with a deep knowledge of your target audience.
And Habbo seems to get that. And MTV seems to get that. About the only people who don’t quite get it are the Lindens, because if they “got it” they’d do a hell of a better job protecting content in their world so that brands knew that they were entering an environment where objects aren’t just prims, they’re items of aspiration, and the object economy is based on a lot more than whether you can “get free stuff” but how, and from whom, and the channels would be protected so that the brands can come in, if they choose, and work with in-world developers to create viral items and experiences which can engage people - their eyeballs AND their brains, I suppose.
But they opened the lid - the copybots set the scene for the Slippcats. All those newbies out there don’t know an Armidi from Havok4 from Windlight, all they want is some nice furniture and a new pair of jeans, and it’s such an uncontained flood - a ripped off, clickable world, that the “space” has been distorted for all those big brands and big bucks.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing, maybe Second Life doesn’t need the big brands and their mega bucks and measuring sticks. But it is perhaps a sign of why Linden wasn’t at the big table this time, they were off in the little room participating in a discussion on “Why the 3D workspace is necessary for today’s information and knowledge management professional”, which either shows you that their focus has shifted into a different “space” or they didn’t play Atari as kids.
Remotely monitoring conversations within Second Life is against the TOS, so perhaps there’s something that could be done with this, but my understanding is that they are going to try to find landlords or owners who will allow these signs and objects to be deployed inworld in SL.
So the first thing to do is to ban Ancient Shriner, the avatar associated with this awful scheme that is going to scrape data from people without their knowing and consent, from all appearances, and tape their conversations for “buzz words. You can do that much as a sign of protest. And also it makes sense to refrain from buying ad space or deploying the signs on your land.
Ancient Shriner is already defacing Second Life everywhere with huge, ugly ad towers with taunting textures about “land fascists” who protest against the signs, and ads for cheapy Internet sites and gadgets that aren’t even inworld businesses. He didn’t put the land to sale, so technically you can’t make the new ad policy the Lindens have “stick”. Still, since he claims he is willing to take down some of these towers or minimize them or have only one per sim (he said all three things to me but none of them are true — all the signs are still in place), he should be asked to do it.
Likely nothing less than a class action suit against these people in RL would work and that has its complications.
Interesting interpretation of what was being said. Unfortunatly one key element of the entire Slippcat program was forgotten or ignored - one that is probably an essential element of Slippcat - “Empowered Engagement” A buzzword yes, but alos a philosophical change in advertising.
WIth the Slippcat system - all control is put in the hands of the user. The user (consumer) has no obligation to click on an object. They are not being forced to stare at ugly billboards, noisy television sets or any other form of push advertising. With Slippcat the user can choose to pull information from an object - and even then they can choose what degree of information they want from an object.
As for content developers hating us - perhaps those who compete with us in making branded items without the permission of the brand owners - but the developers who are building one of a kind unique items, the ones who are creating innovative, eye catching designs that break from the norm - we not only do not compete with them but applaud them.
These virtual worlds open the door for so much creativity, so much experimentation that the best always stands out - and who knows - perhaps soon that degree of excellence may well result in real life recognition - beyond a pat on the back and a hearty well done, but into a design contract with a real life company.
Instead of using virtual worlds as a utopian hideaway, we can really draw them into everyday lives by using them as extentions of our lives - making virtual worlds as indespensable as e-mail.
Sorry but this Slippcat nonsense has made me laugh more then anything else SL-related in months, good since it was all getting a bit serious and depressing.
It won’t work. You cannot gather marketing information worth a damn from anonymous users or from users who go to extraordinary creative lengths to maintain an alternative identity for themselves. You’d be counting clicks for no reason whatsoever except that someone might pay you to count them - except they won’t, no-one with a marketing budget of any value is that dumb.
Advertising at its best can be an extraordinarily creative form of communication. This is not advertising, it’s spam dressed as furniture. Trying to justify spam with buzz-words, promises of new frontiers or any other marketing bull-doodoo is just silly. Who do you think will want that new couch which repeatedly offers to make your penis larger…unless, of course, it actually can?
Why would a big-name retailer pay you to pay users to click furniture to get paid? What are you delivering to the retailer except empty clicks? There is a model for this that just might work (it’s one i prepared earlier: http://nautilina.wordpress.com/2008/02/20/never-out-of-stock/ ), it’s called “Selling People Stuff They Want to Buy” (excuse the jargon) and it’s quite successful sometimes because apparently the end-user gives YOU money and not the other way around. I know it’s radical, a philosophical change you might say, but think about it…
A utopian hideaway? So far, that seems to be what a lot of people want - do you think everyone stands around wishing the advertising would hurry up and get here? It’s really a bit pathetic if this is all we can come up with - apply click-thru advertising to virtual worlds…sigh…
There are ways to advertise and market in virtual worlds, the Greenies build is maybe the most obvious example to date - but of course to achieve that high standard you actually need to have some original ideas and talent, the two things apparently missing from Slippcat.
A click-thru ad (or its equivalent) now referred to as “Empowered Engagement” is really very funny. If a career in virtual spam falls thru’ then maybe try stand-up comedy? Maybe we could be a double act…
Antony, I applaud your recognition of in world content developers. Your idea of finally somehow making that bridge between the virtual and the real (with a virtual couch being the first step in hitting the highway to IKEA) is intriguing, if you can pull it off (but better watch out for all those slap happy utopians!)
But look, and in all fairness, I miss a lot. Ask anyone.
I’m usually the last one to understand a joke. People say stuff and I just sort of stare blankly, I have this delayed reaction thing going on.
And to top it off there was a lot of terminology at the conference that left me baffled so obviously I’m not the most trustworthy interpreter of what was said. (Can you forward some definitions for me please for: monetizing the space, measuring engagement, and intentional transparency?)
So help me out here, because I wonder how my “interesting interpretation” (very kind of you to find it interesting) missed a key element, or which elements I’m reading into all of this that are erroneous?
You say that I missed “Empowered Engagement”. By which you say it’s a revolution in advertising - push, not pull. Consumer choice! Levels of engagement, based on their own desires and needs and preferences.
So just fill me in a little more on that part first. Because how is that MORE choice than, say a banner ad? And if I’m watching TV (I have a remote, so it’s not so hard to choose to engage and disengage with that really either), and one of those ads comes on advertising Chia Pets don’t I have a choice to call it? Or to visit their Web site and order it?
Oh, or say I’m walking down the street, and I pass a store, and there’s a display in the window about a sale but it doesn’t give a lot of detail, just says “Sale”, don’t I have a choice whether to walk into the store to find out more? And once I’m in the store don’t I have a choice to buy?
And P.S. - if you’ve ever seen a line-up outside of A&F then you’ll know that there’s something very, um, engaging to the people who shop there, so you can’t claim that it’s lacking that.
Just fill in the blanks for me, because at each step in any of those chains - banner ad, 1-800 number, retail store - I have the choice as a consumer to more deeply engage with the brand experience. In what way does Slippcat differ from that again?
So then that second thing. If this is all pull and no push, is information EVER gathered on consumers/avatars without their choice or explicit permission? Do you use the avatar “look at” coordinates to track eyeballs on a sign for example? Do you gather any “buzz words” from the public chat on what was said in the vicinity of a sign or item? Do you ever link back to a user ID number? Do users who have been tracked get flagged that they’ve been tracked? Is there an opt-in/opt-out process for collecting this data? Do you share this data on request with anyone from whom it has been collected?
Because if there’s data being collected, even without it being connected to an avatar’s name, then there’s *some* stuff that’s *NOT* pull isn’t there? You’re collecting stuff from people and it’s not because they are ‘empowered and engaged’ it’s because they’re standing NEAR something.
And if they happen to be cuddling on their couch at home and mention a few buzz words in the vicinity, well…I suppose those buzz words might be engaging to some people, and others kind of like being looked at and listened to, but others maybe not so much.
It’s sort of interesting timing, because there was an editorial in the New York Times today about how Web companies are keeping a lot more data than they let on. I’m sure you read it, but a few little clips:
“(Technology companies) are spying on you. …(They’re) record(ing) the sites you visit, the ads you click on, even the words you enter into search engines - information that some hold onto forever. They’re not telling you they’re doing it, and they’re not asking permission. …
The driving force behind this prying is commerce. The big growth area in online advertising right now is “behavioral targeting’.
The Federal Trade Commission has proposed self-regulatory guidelines for companies that do behavioral targeting…The founders wrote the Fourth Amendment - guaranteeing protection against illegal search and seizure - at a time when most were concerned about protecting the privacy of their homes and bodies…(and) have been extended to cover telephone communications. Now work has to be done to give Internet activities the same level of privacy protection.”
And finally, I’m going to leave it to others to comment on how we should stop using virtual worlds as a utopian hideaway. I’ve been mistaken for an augmentationist so I don’t have a lot of street cred in that respect (although I beg to differ and feel I immerse with the best of them).
But I will say that virtual worlds do offer us a form of utopia, because they allow us to imagine different futures, and to explore the possibilities of living, thinking, working and playing within different conceptual models, including the one where advertisers aren’t measuring every click and move, and my furniture doesn’t hand out Lindens like coins stuck between the cushions to every friend who pops by for tea.
@ Eris - geez thanks…now I have to get an MBA to understand this new “Selling People Stuff They Want to Buy” idea (which book was that in? I suspect Tom Peters but maybe it hasn’t hit the shelves yet??)
Haven’t you HEARD Eris? The future is free! Says so in Wired! The inventors of the Long Tail! (I have only BEGUN to debunk!
Anyways, I trust the MTV lady, who made the very valid point that we’re suckers for buying stuff because it helps to make us feel SPECIAL. And we all wanna feel special. And I don’t want to feel like I have to hide the furniture or plead with friends not to click it in order to cover for the fact that my pad is decked out with freebies that spit out payola.
I really wish that line worked though:
“Hey, come over to my place and experience the FUTURE of advertising. Yeah! Just click on my couch, and you’re glimpsing the next Google, baby.”
Somehow I see a lot of eye-rolling going on in addition to comments like “Oh, you finally got that thing to WORK did you” or “It’s not one of those Xcite compatible deals is it?”
(Um, not me, I mean people LIKE me would have friends like that).
OK, I’m off to come up with the NEW NEW future of advertising. I’ve been mulling around this idea about how you could get a LOT of attention if you interrupted events, like the Super Bowl, say, with branded messages. Forget push and pull, how about trap and slap! Just need a virtual world application - what about commercially sponsored SexGen beds that bleat out a little jingle at critical moments?
Oh Dusan… I came over at your call to read this, and now all I want to do is get into a really hot shower, scrub myself until I’m raw, find a way to scrub my brain until all memories of this… Slippcat… are gone, curl up under my duvet and never, ever wake up again to face a world containing people like that. This is beyond frightening an disgusting both.
Jeez…
That is simply appalling… A free-market ‘1984′?… and thanks for reinforcing why I am so uncomfortable about teen worlds and big business.
Sorry… must go and puke now.
Well, I have mixed feelings here.
I know I’m being tracked down and measured every time I pay my shopping in a supermarket. They analyse the things I buy, they know my patterns, they send me coupon codes for discounts on “just the products” I buy more often. I know this goes on all the time.
I also know that Google scans my Gmail account every day. Besides eliminating spam (for which I’m thankful!), they create a profile for me, and now target ads better, about things I’m potentially interested in. I even give them permission to do so — I’m usually logged in on Google Accounts when googling in, well, Google. So I know that the list of links I get as results is different from yours. Our tastes differ, and I get “targetted marketing” for it. For Google, I’m just an account — an email address — but they can tell their advertisers what exactly I like to see on the Internet.
The same happens with eBay and Amazon. They know what I like, what I search, and dynamically profile me, and present me the things I usually buy online.
I also know that Twitter has just one purpose — getting better tracking data. They have no other business model. They don’t sell ads (most people use Twitter-compatible thingies to tweet, and never bother to look at the site anyway, so ads are pretty worthless on their site anyway). They don’t sell “upgrade packages” (”now increase the number of characters you can tweet to your friends to 750 per message!”). No — all they do is scan what I type, link it to my email address, and sell the profile to online advertisers.
This goes on with practically everything I do on the Internet, and has been going on for quite some time. Sure, they might not know my real name and my real address — but they know, every time I log in “somewhere” on the Internet, what my tastes are. I’m tracked and profiled. I’m part of several marketing databases. I get targetted spamming. I can’t avoid it — unless, of course, I delete all my accounts and start from scratch (and even so, I’d be quickly tracked again).
Except on Second Life.
Now, well, the market opportunity is just too great to avoid. Sure, you can’t know what information an “avatar name” cointains — Linden Lab protects your real name. But — really?
All you need it to have sensors sending media parcel URLs to your avatar — that are no media parcel URLs at all, but links to external web servers which can easily check on your IP address. Combine that to a different database where you are, say, logged in with your Google Account or Yahoo ID, and it’s quite likely marketeers will be able to find a match. Run this for a while, and you, as a marketeer, will be pretty good at finding out avatar’s IP addresses (which will give you an approximate location) and their email addresses (from anywhere on eBay, Amazon, Google, or Yahoo).
So if I start buying a lot of shoes in SL, I might suddenly find out that Amazon starts displaying fashion books on the top of my searches, and DVDs like “The Devil Wears Prada”. eBay will automatically send me updates for shoes found for sale there. Yahoo and Google will suddenly display ads for Dolce & Gabbanna shoes. I might not relate the two things for a while, but… isn’t it something that marketeers would just love to have?
The technology is there. I don’t think we’re going to be able to avoid that — specially in Second Life, where it is so easy to do integration with external servers — like we can’t avoid to be tracked every time we visit a search engine or an online shopping guide. I wouldn’t call that “stupid” or “ridiculous” or “silly” or a “waste of money”. Marketeers know that their profiling data is not 100% accurate: I might one day search for virtual worlds, the next day on the current fashion in eye shadow colours, then the latest news from Apple, and finally do a random search for a Bible quote. What will the profiler be able to get out of this data? Will they present me ads for nice, discreet Macs in my favourite colour, that can be personally engraved with messages like “God Is Love”? Very likely, not. Tracking doesn’t work like that, and you require a bit more profile data to get a more accurate picture. Even if I’m no way near to look like a 20-something years old redhead in RL — and 99% of what I might buy in SL will never affect my decisions of what I can buy in RL — that is not an issue. Tracking software can still get some preferences out of my SL experience. They might be able to pick out my favourite colours. They might be able to figure out that I’m a “quick shopper” — spending more time looking at clothes than actually wearing them. They might see that I’m keen on following advice from fashion blogs — ie. I might be logged on WordPress, watch a fashionista blog, and then immediately go in-world, every time my favourite fashion advisor in SL puts up a picture of something in purple or beige. It doesn’t mean that I’m likely to buy mini-skirts in SL. But it can help marketing profilers to understand that I tend to buy beige or purple things.
So… do I like the idea that I’m being constantly tracked? Certainly not. Can I do anything about it? Probably not — we’ve lost that war on the Web, we will lose it on virtual worlds as well. Does it seriously hurt my privacy? Well, it’s a difficult question to answer. If it’s opt-in, it’s ok; if it provides at least an opt-out feature, it’s acceptable. If I can’t avoid it (the most likely case), it’s different — but I might not be able to do anything about it.
As to the virtual worlds suddenly targetting kids and teens… well… I have my thoughts about it. Teens are a market since they have money to spend and are easily persuaded/convinced (curiously enough, in my country, recently legislation was passed to limit certain ads specifically targeted to children, since they cannot understand the difference between “truth” an an “ad”). However, I always wondered why marketeers are so keen on the teen market — their money, even if easily spent, is limited by their parents’ budget. On the other hand, the 40+ market is so much more interesting: most people will have a stable life and enough money to spend — far more than the average teenager. They are, however, much more careful buyers. Interestingly enough, the small game developers (the ones selling millions of games with a low budget, but highly addictive, and charging US$10-20 with an easy download) are curiously aggressively targeting the female gamers, who have been seriously neglected by the first person shooters and other action-destruction games out there. Strange that this market goes unexplored in virtual worlds — when in Second Life it’s clear that the content for female avatars still surpasses what’s available for the male ones, both in quantity, quality, and even cost. Well, that’s what you get on a sales-driven economy — content designers in SL create what is sellable, not what marketeers think will sell!
My surprise is not that so many different “virtual worlds for kids” are popping up. They know that teenagers have very short attention spans, and will hop crazily across all these new options — while they get bored with SL after a few minutes (see how small the Teen Grid is, when compared to the Adult Grid). Whereas Second Life tends to have much older people around — who stay around for years, and are constantly consuming content and very well willing to pay for it.
I still find it ironic, Gwyn, that the New York Time chimed in on this issue today, giving some intriguing examples of how all this tracking ALSO plays out, in addition to the D&G shoe ads:
“The information, however, gets…a lot more sensitive. Tech companies can keep track of when a particular Internet user looks up Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, adult Web sites, buys cancer drugs online or participates in anti-government discussion groups.
Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal. (”Hmm…I wonder why I always get those drug-rehab ads when I surf the Internet on Jane’s laptop?”)
There is..no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders are alcoholics or have AIDS. It could also end up with the government, which needs only to serve a subpoena to get it).”
Now, in Second Life we have the veil of anonymity. HOWEVER, Van Zyl is imploring us:
“Instead of using virtual worlds as a utopian hideaway, we can really draw them into everyday lives by using them as extentions of our lives - making virtual worlds as indespensable as e-mail.”
So, here’s the thing…first time you click that couch, and then decide to go to that Web site where more information about the couch is available, well…you’re now part of the big old Internet data stream, and suddenly all your in-world purchases and clicks can theoretically be connected to your very real world identity.
The FTC is calling for self regulation. That’s fine. But its also been suggested that a “do-not-track” list be established for those who prefer to opt out. Clear standards for opting in. Guidance as to what information is collected, what the rules should be about selling it and sharing it, and what the rights of the person being tracked are in the same regard.
I’m all for metrics. Companies have a right to measure the success of their spend. But I also want the right to opt out, to know when I’m in a space where I AM being measured (much as you KNOW when you’re using Google), and have access to clear privacy and data collection policies of the companies doing the collecting.
As for the content developers, I hope they all take heart in his hope that the excellent product they create “may well result in real life recognition - beyond a pat on the back and a hearty well done, but into a design contract with a real life company”.
Finally, I don’t mean to imply, if I did, that any of what Slippcat is doing is a waste of money for the advertisers. It’s a nice little business model. I think if they take a great deal of care in the coming months to reach out to the content creators they might even get some product more deeply placed into the market than just a bunch of banners and kiosks and freebies, and even if they don’t it will take a very long time before anyone cares that they’re being measured except for a small circle of people who think too much, or get confused too easily (like me), and who, now that you mention it, really really needs a new pair of shoes.
Dusan, I definitely agree with you that I’m not too keen on having anyone to know when I click, for instance, by mistake, on an ad that leads to a porn website, an online casino, one that sells illegal drugs, or a paedophilia data haven — and suddenly having all bells ringing on some police station near my home. I think there have to be limits somewhere to our privacy, but I’m rather pessimistic — privacy is becoming one of the more elusive things to have these days. One day our only “opt-out” option will be to turn the computer off and disconnect it from the ‘net if we wish to make sure that nobody is doing all sorts of silly correlations with the random browsing on the Web.
At some stage we could still claim that nobody could do those correlations fast enough, with the terabytes and terabytes of data out there. Now Google stores 6 billion websites — in memory! — and can locate millions of links in less than a fifth of a second.
This is scary.
/me nods sadly.
There’s one thing Slippcat and the other meta-scavengers seems to be missing in all their plans to “monetize the space”. We, the residents, have the same build tools they do - and in some less-reputable cases, better tools. If they introduce spam-furniture or some other unwelcome marketing device then how long before some copybot-wielding resident strips that functionality out of the object and makes it available everywhere in neutered form? My guess would be about 20 minutes and altho i’d condemn any other content theft within SL i think i’d be cheering that one on - hypocritical i know!
I’m not against advertising or marketing within SL, just make it good advertising. I think it’s like the difference between the junk mail that lands on your doormat and the IKEA (or any other furniture retailer’s) catalogue you picked up in-store. They’re both advertising but one is welcome, giving you information you want, while the other is unsolicited, probably badly targeted and wasteful of resources. If advertisers and marketeers can provide compelling and engaging advertising within virtual worlds then great, but virtual equivalents of junk mail or will fail every time.
This nonsense just won’t work in SL - altho it might in other virtual worlds, particularly (sadly) the ones populated by kids. Maybe one of the most unique things about SL is the fact that its population is so uniquely armed to defend itself from these kind of (potentially unwelcome) incursions?