Social networking for whales

Hi. Thanks for having me. Before I get started I should mention, as I do in my own blogs, that I write as an IBMer rather than IBM. My posts don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions. Hopefully, that much is obvious, but perhaps it's worth mentioning in case anyone mistakenly thinks anything that follows is an official company direction.

I recently (and finally) read 'The Tipping Point' by Malcolm Gladwell, which my friend Andy was so insistent I should read that he loaned me his copy. While of course it made me ponder, yet again, the explosive growth of interest in virtual worlds in the past couple of years, the thing that struck me most was the Dunbar constant. Malcolm Gladwell quotes anthropologist Professor Robin Dunbar on the subject:

"The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us."

For anyone interested in enabling (or even participating) in online communities and social networking, this idea is obviously an important one.

Perhaps it's unsurprising, but I personally find a large overlap between the people I know in the real world (and in various virtual ones) and my online social networking friends. Interestingly enough, it turns out I currently have 122 friends on Facebook and 188 connections on LinkedIn. I follow 101 people on Twitter and 168 on Flickr. These are small numbers, and largely these connections represent genuine social relationships. In fact, I tend to use many of these tools as lazy ways of keeping my friends in my peripheral vision and occasionally updating them about what I'm up to.

Grant McCracken (who incidentally has a great story about appearing on Oprah) was thinking about social networking and Dunbar recently and asks whether online tools help gregarious people expand their number of friends beyond Dunbar's constant of 150. This makes me wonder how social networking "whales", with thousands of friends, manage. Robert Scoble today has 4249 friends on Facebook, follows 4656 people on Twitter and 1954 on Pownce. Asked whether a 'friend' on a social network is really a friend, Scoble replied that "a 'friend' is someone you want in your network. No more, no less". Robert, I'd love to know whether something like Facebook is purely a distribution mechanism, or whether you think of your network as concentric circles with thousands of followers at the outer edges and a smaller number at the warm fuzzy centre of your online world? And, as a follow up question, what will happen when you hit the Facebook 5,000 friend limit?

What about large corporate networks in social networking sites like Facebook? The IBM network in Facebook consists of over 23,000 people (more people, though a smaller percentage of total employees, than either Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, or Sun). How useful is a network that big though? Isn't it a bit of a whale too? In fact, doesn't the important interconnectedness happen in the overlapping sub-networks between those people and their friends?

When talking about virtual worlds as a form of social media, the themes of user generated content and social networking seem like a suitable backdrop. Indeed, those are usually the themes I use to demonstrate the relevance and importance of virtual worlds to people who are already getting comfortable with social software.  Personally, I try to invest time in meeting friends and colleagues in virtual worlds and games, and this has proven to be a useful way for me to develop and maintain friendships with other IBMers around the world, as well as gradually build and broaden my network. To take one example, I've only ever met Jessica Qin 'virtually', in Second Life, but that doesn't mean the relationship is not real. In fact, we've built a great working relationship and got to know each other pretty well over the past 18 months.

An employer who sees the potential of virtual worlds for bringing large numbers of employees together probably needs to consider the smaller sub-networks too. Helping those small groups of people meet and work together is key. Spending time not working together is just as important too. How many times can you think of in your own life that a chance introduction over lunch or at the watercooler / pub (delete as appropriate) led to an interesting new project? Rather than focusing only on the large-scale, we also need to be thinking about those close personal social networks.

Comments

[andyp]

1.

As a "friend" of yours, I thought I'd mention that even before I read the book in question, I'd also pondered the Dunbar constant. In the context of virtual worlds, of course, it is interesting in that I have to annotate my friends lists both to keep track of RL<->avatar names, and also because the friends lists have the potential to break the infamous number limit and cause me confusion and forgetfulness ;-)

[Amarilla]

2.

In RL we are part of larger ( than 150 ) communities / societies / corporations because we delegate ( or have the delegation enforced on us since birth )our powers and rights.

In RL if you focus too much your attention on what i'm doing home, or in my spare time, you have and i have problems.

In VWs i'd rather prefere to manage myself my own list of friends. It's the only place where i have the freedom to join, to logout and to decide how much time / money / efforts i wanna spend.

I'm pretty sure i don't wanna be - in a VW - part of a Corporation and i don't wanna talk at the Virtual Lunch about Corporation.

And i don't want my guild's CEO to tell me : " starting tomorrow we gonna fire 5 % of personell , based on Corporation Financial politic ".

[Roo Reynolds]

3.

@Andy: You are indeed the friend in question, and my thanks for the loan of a thought-provoking book. I'm only sorry my dog nibbled it. I shall be ordering you a fresh copy.

@Amarilla: I'm really happy to be in a virtual world at work if it serves as a way of getting me close to the people I want to get to know, regardless of their real world location. I don't want to fly across the atlantic every week, and conference calls just don't cut it. The idea that you would (and, I agree, I would) rather be in control of where we invest our time and attention is a great point. A nice illustration of the importance of small, personal, informal networks within the large, potentially difficult to navigate or understand, corporate structure.

[Amarilla]

4.

Try Messenger with voice or Skype.

[Mike Sellers]

5.

Excellent post, Roo. Good to have you here.

A number of people have commented on Dunbar's Number, in particular Christopher Allen's interesting blog posts, along with Raph Koster's multiple posts on this topic. And of course it's come up a time or two in discussions here on TN.

Personally, I've become fairly disenchanted with the "whale" networks. They're not really social and they're not really networks. That is, when you get to hundreds or thousands of links (I won't call them friends, despite Scoble's near-tautologous definition), there is very little actual sociability going on there -- more a faux-sociability based in the accretive, perhaps materialistic view that "if some is good, more must be better." And, there's very little network in these connections: the fact that you and I might be connected together via several other people comes up tangentially on a few sites like LinkedIn, but typically the underlying structure of the networks is either ignored or, perhaps due to the "bigger is better" mentality, diluted to the point of irrelevance. If everyone has hundreds or thousands of friends, then the network is overly (and spuriously) connected -- there are effectively no hubs, connectors, or other remaining structure in the "network."

Existing networks seem to be based on the simplistic idea behind Metcalfe's Law -- that the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of nodes in it. That may be the case with fax machines, but it doesn't seem to be the case with large personal networks. Others have suggested that something more like Zipf's Law or a cumulative Pareto distribution could be applied to the value in social networks, where value accumulates but with a decreasing rate, not an exponential one.

This is a fascinating area, especially as people tend to become more interconnected in life offline and especially online. But: the condition assumed in each of these "laws" -- and assumed in current social networking regimes -- is that every node and every connection are of equal value. This may be true abstractly of fax machines or web links, but is it true of people, of friendship links?

I don't think so. Not all connections are of equal value, and treating them as such both devalues the truly valuable ones and gives unwarranted value to those that are not only low-value, but of negative value.

Contrary to the ever-rising network values supported by current social networking sites, I suspect something like the Dunbar Number represents a peak in a normal(ish) curve of value. That is, up to some point (call it 150 plus or minus, with personal variance), adding more connections to my network typically adds perceived value to me, even if not all the connections are of equal value, and even if some of them drain value from my network. Past that point, the overall value actually begins to decrease: the chance of a having enough noisy or negative-value connection increases past a tipping point, increasing the probability that a low-value connection will obscure a high-quality one. Take this far enough, and the "weeds" choke out the "flowers" in your social garden. You may still have 100 or so true friends, colleagues, resources, etc., in your network, but instead of having 50 acquaintances, mistakes, or hangers-on in there, you now have 500 or 5000 that demand equal (or more) attention, thus limiting your ability to connect with and find value from the high-quality nodes. Thus the value of the network overall falls down to some asymptotic minimum, if you stick around that long.

So - is social networking for "whales"? Not in any social sense, where you might try to derive personal value from the bloated, cetaceous ("Networks of Unfortunate Size") network. Beyond the size of Dunbar's village number, we leave the territory of personal, sociable Gemeinschaft, and head into the impersonal, commercial, power-broking streets of Gesellschaft. I suspect too this is why networks, villages, and neighborhoods split like growing cells when the network becomes too large, maintaining a sort of external symbolic relationship to each other (with unfortunate side-effects of rivalry and distrust sometimes).

[andyp]

6.

Surely Scoble is sufficiently powerful to cause FB to up the 5,000 limit? :-) we shall see...

[Roo Reynolds]

7.

@Amarilla I agree, voice is great for small team meetings. In fact, quite a lot of my day to day work with my small worldwide team is still done with conference calls. I find that gets far less productive the larger the crowd though, as you very quickly get into the "everyone is on mute" syndrome in which you stop getting any feedback from anyone because they're all muted so as not to disturb everyone. Quite apart from the delay while you wait for eveyone to join, and the annoyance that with 20 people on the call the simplex nature of voice means only one conversation at once.

At the same time, for the informal stuff, I would rarely start an IM or conference call with a couple of friend to say "hi, how was your weekend?", whereas I would have that conversation with them if we happened to be online at the same time in a virtual world. Andy (the friend with the dog-eared book above) has a recent post about exactly that type of serendipitous chance meeting, which he reckons would not have happened so readily in another medium.

[Roo Reynolds]

8.

@Mike: Excellent roundup, thank you. I certainly agree that large networks naturally break into smaller ones. I like the image of cellular division rather than fragmentation too.

[Amarilla]

9.

Nah....it's too boring and stressing , for my taste....

I go into a VW : to relax, to have fun, to RMT ; in none of the above i need a corporation , no way.

Well, sure, i agree , the RL corporations may be interested into controling my virtual life, but i can do few things : delete you from my friends-list, leave your guild and simply logout and never come back.

[epredator]

10.

I have to pop in with my frightening mathematical idea around the suitability of communication media.
We, in corporate world, have an awful lot of telephone conferences. Meetings wih more than 5 people, quite often lots more. By meeting I may mean an annonucement, or just a meeting about something or other so the mode changes a great deal.
I had noticed that the first 5 minutes of a telecon is torture. You wait for people to arrive, beep into the call. This means it is not possible to have a meaningful engagement with the people on the other end of the phone whilst waiting for that first 5 mins. Its frustrating.
Also that first 5 minutes people are not able to enagage with many of the other threads of communication as the voice call could start in 30 seconds or 5 minutes.
What do we do in normal human real life. We tend to chatter with the people before a meeting, reaffirm social bonds, find out what is going on.
The virtual world communications, when powered in an avatar based form offer some of the non verbal communications and ability to see and feel the mood of the meeting before it starts.
I wrote about the post event mingle way back, but the pre-event mingle is even more important.

So, if a large organization has say has this usage profile for voice commnuications

330,000 employees
3 telecons a week each
5 minutes dead time at the start of each call.

That’s 330000 x 15 minutes = 4950000 minutes of dead time PER WEEK!
You can check the maths its an average but we could be losing 9.4 years a week into dead telephone beeping time.

Now that is not relaxing time, that is not productive time that is frustrated, bored, waiting time.

If I am off by even an order of magnitude it is huge. I am sure many people have felt this though and know what I mean.

There are other solutions, arrive on time, dont have so many meetings etc. However the reality of multi person communication means that some of the elements that make these more effective and more human can be fonud in virtual worlds.

So, for the first 5 minutes a small group of people with a common interest are gathered in a place they can communicate in many more ways than just text or just voice. That sounds like a reasonable thing to pursue, even if the world istelf is made up of huge numbers of potential people to be part of the group at that point in time.

[Amarilla]

11.

Sure, and while my alt bows and listens i can have a nice ol' good sleep in RL. Or play Counter Strike.

[Amarilla]

12.

@ epredator, assuming that a VW is more - or different - than a teleconference, you don't wanna hold it in LL's servers, do you ?

And you don't wanna LL's servers to go down in the middle of your speach.

[James Taylor]

13.

Stephen Fry's Friendship Proxy Group is an ingenious solution to some of the problems with social networks, and the Facebook implementation of one.

The group has 4,995 members (so just ahead of Robert Scoble's direct Facebook friends) who want to be in Stephen's network. Judging by the photo on the group, Stephen would find such numbers unmanageable in his direct network. I wonder what this tacktic does to the 150 figure; would you be able to have 150 proxy groups, or does a proxy group equal, say, a tenth of the people who are members.

Now I'm not as famous as Stephen (there are James Taylor fans out there, but I don't sing or play guitar!), or even Roo, but proxy friends definitely sound useful since I would lose track well before the 150 average!

[epredator]

14.

@amarilla I was being generic. The pattern of operation, and the benefits of a virtual world are precisely why we have some other internal metaverses now.
as with all media forms some places are more suitable than others for certain things.
We have intranet, internet, extranet as a pattern already, no reason to assume one virtual world beats another as it depends on the context and the content of the meeting.

You are correct, I dont want servers going down mid meeting. I want virtual worlds fit for business aswell as ones that allow for a more quirky, creative and expressive existence.

Whilst much of what we have experienced and expressed has been through second life, that has been the one that is there, one that we can share things with anyone. That's a strength and a weakness of course.

Also to stay on Roo's size of community thread, I was to be in a place and meet the right people at the right time. I come into the office sometimes just so that I know I will, but equally I go to an SL gathering with a suitably diverse, but matching set of people attending.

I agree with you that you should not have to mix social and work life, if you dont want to. There is a seperation to be had here.
Going somewhere to relax, and keeping that somewhere special for that purpose is something we all do. It may be a park, a holiday, a game, a book, a virtual world. However we also go to places to work, an office, an email client, a park, a city, read a work book, enter a virtual world or access a website.
Each of those areas have distinct properties, and probably distinct social networks.

The risk/danger/benefit is that because one medium is associated with one primary activity it is not respected for the other, and may be difficult for other people to understand you are off duty/on duty.

The bigger and more global your network and the more channels, metaversal or otherwise the stricter you have to be with people about that time and the mode that you are in. (IMHO)

[Roo Reynolds]

15.

To underline epred's last response to "you don't wanna hold it in LL's servers, do you", depending on the conversation, while I'd personally do everything possible in public, it might indeed be entirely necessary to have corporate intranet virtual worlds for some discussions. Depending on the level of privacy required, that means not just private islands but potentially something running on our own servers. Since part of our day jobs now is creating such worlds you might reasonably expect posts on that subject from Ian and/or myself later this month. Unless anyone violently objects, I may post something about the recent announcement of virtual worlds guidelines too.

@James: Stephen Fry's Friendship Proxy Group is a great example of working around the problems of trying to use a social network for something its not. While I agree with Andy that Scoble might even be able to put his cetacean weight to bear on the reported 5000 friend limit, another approach for him would be to set up a similar group.

[Shava Nerad/Shava Suntzu in SL]

16.

Again, I'll take apart a place where one word is used for different things.

I get paid to blog on gather.com, where I'm a news/opinion correspondent (http://iconoclasm.gather.com). I have more than the average number of friends there, and I know very few of them in any important way. To me, friends on gather are mostly a list of subscribers to my content. It is a one-to-many relationship, regardless of how it is used or how it looks.

On the other hand, in any MMORPG I play, friends are important (but relatively impersonal) to me. Outside my guild, if I friend someone, they are folks I enjoy as companions and playfellows (why should we outgrow the term at elementary school?).

In Second Life, my friends list is confusing and I desire more structure. I have journalism sources, people who might someday want me to do an avatar makeover, someone who said something interesting at a panel (or thought I did).

So I use the last tab on the person's profile as though I were using a contact manager, and each person gets a note when they are friended. Some get the sort of businessy crap you put on business contacts who aren't *really* friends ("2 kids, one at Dartmouth, his wife doesn't know about his SL fiance," "tap later for story on his in-world business," "excellent scripter -- made [widget] -- keep in mind for Indigenis").

In livejournal, I label my friends page "People who care." These are all people I have met in person -- some not for decades, in person -- who care about my personal thoughts and I care about what is going on in their personal lives.

So here we have four things at least -- the spammy (or fan-y) friends list, the pickup-game friends list, the mixed friend and contact list (annotated), and a real friends list.

In rural New England, we're a little conservative about really embracing new friends. I, in particular, grew up in a family culture where a true friend is someone you would sacrifice much for. And so we are a bit reticent to let people in, but once they are in, they are your friends forever.

I found that the west coast of the US is not like this. People have less gradation among kinds of friends and acquaintances, and are perhaps overwhelmed by Dunbar's Number on a regular basis, and for many friendship is measured by "what have we done for one another *lately*" From my point of view it certainly seemed like a push for quantity over quality. (She now braces for a flame onslaught from the Pacific Time contingent...:)

I found this culturally disconcerting, when relationships I might have qualified as New England friends turned out to be West Coast friends.

It makes me wonder how mobility and telecommunications have put strains on social systems, as you grow up with Dunbar's network, then get Dunbarred at college, then Dunbarred at your first job, moving to another city for another job, and so on -- all the while accreting emails, phone numbers, professional contacts, and social networks.

Does having children warp your Dunbar set?

Many thoughts -- I'll follow more of the above links later.

[Michael Rowe]

17.

Fit for business... @epredator you and I have these discussions and I find it interesting when I see some of the VW citizens getting upset that businesses are invading their space. Whenever I hear comments such as those, I think back to what are corporations made of, people...People like you and all of us on this thread. People tend to think of corporations as being something other than people.

Now back to Fit for Business. I think this is really "Fit for Use". I can't think of any of my personal conversations or personal data, that I would like to lose just because a server is reset. I personally don't like wasting my time looking for things (that is why I use search engines and social tagging), and I don't find it acceptable if my avatar in World of warcraft loses all of his gear because of a database update.

Michael

[thoreau]

18.

150 max for social relationships?

What's the min?

I think I'm going to start spamming strangers on the street to be my friend. I have a bad feeling that I'm way on the other end of the curve.

[Amarilla]

19.

"...you and I have these discussions and I find it interesting when I see some of the VW citizens getting upset that businesses are invading their space."

Is not my space, is LL's space ; i don't get upset, only bored. I can barely manage my spare time between realtives an friends.

Nobody accounts a stranger on internet for a friend. And while i might have a friend working - by haphazard - in same corp., in a corp. you never have friends but foes.

IF the US culture got so disconnected from the rest of the world , that there everybody is friend to anyone, but nobody really cares for eachother, that's happening because everybody is focused on selling , not on to producing , everybody is focused on earning " corporate ranks " rather than expertise and values. Everybody is selling " the perceived value ". But while you can manipulate the perception, you cannot manipulate the outcome and the consequences. " Synthetic but natural identical ",and then you wonder why your kids growth obese and ill. " Virtual but so rich in social oportunities " , then you wonder why your neighbor spends 10 hours at work and 6 hours in a VW online and her kids acts weird and dangerous at school and on street.

In this case,IF this is the case, the VWs are the perfect medium for business : doing business with basically nothing. Virtual society, virtual friendship, virtual network. Whatever comes after the word " virtual ", it means : it's not true, it's not for real. It's a fantasy , and as any other type of fantasy it can bear consequences if you get too much involved. You life is unfortunately so short , and you chose to waste it with fakes. So sad.

[Elle Pollack]

20.

@Amarilla: So if I were to ever meet you in Second Life, would you, sitting at your keyboard, then be a fake person?

@Shava: Do you use the calling card/friend list distinction to seperate your list at all? (I'll save my friendlist for actual friends and people I'm directly working with, calling cards for everyone else.

[Amarilla]

21.

Yes. I'm a fake when i'm playing , when i'm pretending. I am more than the sum of my fantasies.I send voluntarily and conscious in games only a part of myself. In SL you gonna meet only a small part of me. Even if sometime in the future you'll be able to hear or even to smell online my fart, you'll never know how i feel when i smile and you'll never know how my body hurts.

The only " virtual " place where i'm not a fake is when i'm dreaming : there i contemplate my own soul .

You cannot do to me any significant good or bad in a VW. I'm not there , you're not there. And i wanna keep it this way . Would you join me in my dream , if the server is my own brain ?

[Amarilla]

22.

".. I was being generic. The pattern of operation, and the benefits of a virtual world are precisely why we have some other internal metaverses now."

".. it might indeed be entirely necessary to have corporate intranet virtual worlds for some discussions. Depending on the level of privacy required, that means not just private islands but potentially something running on our own servers."

"The bigger and more global your network and the more channels, metaversal or otherwise the stricter you have to be with people about that time and the mode that you are in. (IMHO)"

Are you trying to be " Metaversial " and " Global " in a Corporate Intranet network ?

[Roo Reynolds]

23.

Since two of those three quotes are from epredator, I'll just give one third of an answer...

Some corporate intranets are global. As to whether than can be, or need to be, metaversial (or metaversal?), I guess that's still up for debate. I personally think there are a lot of advantages to using virtual worlds for corporate collaboration (which sounds horrible; I really just mean people who happen to work in the same company getting to know each other better).

[Amarilla]

24.

Ok. Fine by me. Now let go back to VWs : you don't trust to do biz using LL's servers, but i'm supposed to believe in the benefits of....guess what : doing biz exactely there .

To me it looks like : we're talking here about a video-teleconference where all the participants are precisely ID-ed and located / traced , and they can use animated cartoons . During the work-hours ofcourse. That way, i'm gonna going to know you better...boss. May my alt kiss your virtual ass , kindly please ?

[Amarilla]

25.

Or what , are you going to ignore my virtual behavior when about salary ?

[Wonderwebby]

26.

Roo I was just rambling on about Virtual Vicariosity after a discussion in world with a colleague last night and your blog came up on twitter. Does this web2.0 thing help me relate and work with people better in the corporate world? Oooo yeah.

[Wonderwebby]

27.

Roo I was just rambling on about Virtual Vicariosity after a discussion in world with a colleague last night and your blog came up on twitter. Does this web2.0 thing help me relate and work with people better in the corporate world? Oooo yeah.

[epredator]

28.

@amarilla
The quotes Roo was not commenting on were about the patterns of operation within a virtual world. I was indicating that what people can do in a virtual world, using the metaphors we have to today, have a benefit. The discussion of a universe of virtual worlds, or the links between them is a different one.

So just as with the black hole in Snowcrash not everyone is allowed in. Whilst it may appear that the metaverse is one big place, if you cant get in does it matter?

So just as we have private areas using web technology, whether complete seperate networks such as intranets, password protected personal web servers, members only areas on shopping websites the pattern is likely to be the same in teh end whether we are in 2d or 3d.

So there is a separation here of what people do, and where they do it. A single hosted environment model, ableit called a grid is very different to a truly distributed grid that allows for nodes to connect with one another as needed.

One point of view is that the platforms and technologies do not really matter. e.g. a corporation is a 'group' of 'friends' just a very big one. As soon as any group, company, family, gang becomes large and distributed enough it needs richer constructs to maintain its bonds.

Those contructs are technically enabled and enhanced by metaverse style interactions. They may also be helped by 'game' style interactions. e.g team building of an away day outward bound course, karting trip, cinema trip, counter strike clan sessions, Second Life halloween parties all seem to help people bond in a social or business-social sense.

[Amarilla]

29.

Well, thank you very much , now it makes much more sense to me.Or at least i hope , coz ima kinda slow when about numba 2, 3 & 150. Just kidding :-)

[Elle Pollack]

30.

Yes. I'm a fake when i'm playing , when i'm pretending. I am more than the sum of my fantasies.I send voluntarily and conscious in games only a part of myself. In SL you gonna meet only a small part of me. Even if sometime in the future you'll be able to hear or even to smell online my fart, you'll never know how i feel when i smile and you'll never know how my body hurts.

But how is that different from real life? We hide parts of ourselves all the time, more or less so depending on the degrees of seperation, pretend things are all right when they aren't, seperate private and public lives. Even in non VW settings on the internet, such degrees of openness exist. So it's not usefull for drawing lines between "real" and "virtual".

To compound the confusion, not everyone in a social world like SL is actively playing a role. When someone like Richard Bartle comes into SL to lecture or hold a Q&A session, he is there as Richard Bartle the real person with an avatar standing in for the flesh and blood presence. I'm a middle of the road case; my avatar is mostly a representation of my RL self but seen through a virtual filter, with times that I'll drop "in character" acting in ways the avatar can but a person could not. At the far end are the people who use SL to create entirely different personas. If they're skillful, it can be very hard to tell the difference. (By contrast, in game worlds and/or worlds with an emphais on structured role-playing, the distinction between in and out of character is much more obvious...and many of those exist in SL too.)

The level of persona and the distance people keep between avatar and player is a choice. Where you're mistaken is about the fact that they can ever be completely severed. An avatar by definition has a real person behind it somewhere; if it didn't it would be called a bot or non-player character. They may be distancing themselves but they still posess a concious mind and human emotions which an avatar can't posess on its own. There is no such thing as a "virtual human mind" or "virtual emotion"; we don't have the technology to translate those into bits.

(Nor is "virtual" worthless; the military is fond of virtual combat training these days, people spend long hours recreating virtual versions of historical places (perhaps ones that no longer exist in real form) so that people can tour them...)

31.

"But how is that different from real life? We hide parts of ourselves all the time, more or less so depending on the degrees of seperation..."

I was talking about what we share , not about what we hide.

[Amarilla]

32.

Oops

[Dan Hunter]

33.

@Amarilla: Please let up on the flaming and trolling (in various threads). I used to be patient and forgiving but haven't been accused of this for months.

[epredator]

34.

@elle That is very well put. There is always a real person involved, who may have made a choice to behave and express in a particular way.
With marketing people concerned over demographics and who to sell to, I tend to throw in the confusion that whilst you might be spend ages digging to get to the root human, there may be a set of other expressions of the root human that can also be enagaged with.
If you sell virtual motorbikes a person with a biker role will buy one, regardless of their root human. However that may just expose elements in that root human to reach them with something else.
In the friends sense, the element that gets friended is the elements of the portayal of a persona real or virtual that you want to interact with in future.

It occured to me that that may help with the amount of friends problem. If each friend is just the element of that persona that you want to interact with on that channel in the future, then whale contact lists work fine?

[Elle Pollack]

35.

I was talking about what we share , not about what we hide.

Doesn't matter; it's two sides of the same coin.

[Amarilla]

36.

Elle Pollack says:

"I was talking about what we share , not about what we hide.

Doesn't matter; it's two sides of the same coin."

You still don't get it yet.

A coin is defined by its two sides , indeed , and cannot be but two sided.

I agree, me too i need dreams, fantasies, books, movies, love , friends...but i'm damn sure i can survive without the virtual those.

[Elle Pollack]

37.

That was a rather nonsensical reply; I said (using a common metaphor) that what we show and what we hide are part of the same thing and you're talking about the coin's esential two-sidedness?

And yes, anyone can survive without virtual anything - virtual worlds for the general public are primarily part of the entertainment industry after all. (Course someone could make an interesting arguement if they brought up Maslow's hierarchy of needs in the VW context...actualy, New World Notes allready did.) It still has little to do with anything I said, except by saying "Virtual Friend", you still refuse to identify an avatar with the human behind it and aren't likely to bother considering otherwise.

(Sorry for continuing to persue this tangent, Dan, but she was getting on my nerves too.)

[Amarilla]

38.

"(Sorry for continuing to persue this tangent, Dan, but she was getting on my nerves too.)"

For nerves, take a pill , dear.

Dan Hunter says:

"@Amarilla: Please let up on the flaming and trolling (in various threads). I used to be patient and forgiving but haven't been accused of this for months."

You better stop threatening your visitors, Dan Hunter. Two reasons : your paternalistic attitude is not academic and for sure doesn't fit with a blog; and the 2nd: we don't visit your blog to see your virtual muscles acting at whim against us.

Oh ,that " forgiveness " part was a special sort of joke ? Home-made maybe ? Do you really feel like a little god or emperor or pope or what , in a blog , forgiving - or not - ?!

Dude, make your mind for once : is your blog an open forum for discussions of varies ideeas regarding the VWs , or just a place where to advertise SL and USA political propaganda ?

All those guys having little tools in RL uses to buy themselves big guns in computer games. Or blogs.

[Amarilla]

39.

Urizenus says:

Greg, this isn't my blog and you and the TN admins have to decide what kind of space you are trying to cultivate. I feel like I have a residual interest at best. I mean I used to read this blog first thing every day. Over the last two years I read it less and less because I feel it is becoming more and more insular and less and less contentful. I come back now and then to check and see if there is any detailed thoughtful analysis of topics like Bragg vs. Linden Lab, I find nothing, and then I leave for an even longer period of time.

The *feel* of the blog is now like this -- it's like a little virtual cocktail party where people working on gaming can stay in touch, but the ground rules are "let's keep it all friendly and let's not say anything controversial -- keep it chitchatty".

Well, add a little Monica , a little Prokofy pretended ban , and here you are : mambo number five :)

[Amarilla]

40.

"Roo Reynolds says:
.......
@Amarilla: I'm really happy to be in a virtual world at work if it serves as a way of getting me close to the people I want to get to know, regardless of their real world location. I don't want to fly across the atlantic every week, and conference calls just don't cut it. The idea that you would (and, I agree, I would) rather be in control of where we invest our time and attention is a great point. A nice illustration of the importance of small, personal, informal networks within the large, potentially difficult to navigate or understand, corporate structure."

Some news : a wide range of medium-/big corporations , already applies a specific policy in this matter : they banned the access to VWs from the workplace. Unless you are the CEO, a high ranked staffer or unless being in a VW is your specific job you're paid for.