Posts from 2009
August 18, 2009
Do You Wanna Date My Avatar
Things sure have changed since the early days, when people debated if the term Avatar was too geeky…
August 14, 2009
Habitat Chronicles gets a new web host
As part of our long term agenda of making this thing work ever so much better, we’ve shifted Habitat Chronicles to a new web host provider, Hurricane Electric.
As part of this I’ve also converted the blog from Movable Type to WordPress. This was surprisingly easy, considering that it required rewriting all the page templates from MT’s own internal markup language into The World’s Worst Programming Language™.
The idea here is to improve things, but no doubt there will be bits and pieces that didn’t quite make the transition successfully, so if you spot any broken internal links, missing images, etc., please let us know.
August 12, 2009
Introducing Reputation Wednesdays at BuildingReputation.Com
Reputation Wednesday is an ongoing series of essays about reputation-related matters being posted over at buildingreputation.com which Randy co-authors. This week’s essay is entitled Ratings Bias Effects. This will likely be the only cross-posting, so be sure to subscribe! :-)
August 11, 2009
Entitlement: When User Empowerment Backfires #octribe
Scott Moore called for posts on the topic of Fostering culture in and around online communities I chose the suggested subtopic: Culture clashes between the community and the host organization.
This is my first #OCTribe post, and I’m running late, so please forgive the terseness. I may flesh this out a bit more over the coming days — randy
This post is directed at social media product designers and community moderation staff.
How much power do you give your users?
- Do you invest special powers in your users, perhaps to help you moderate your community?
- Do you have, or want to have, user advisory groups to help improve your product by providing feedback direct from the customer?
- Do you have appointed (or self appointed) long-term community leaders that are causing you problems but you’re petrified of how much damage they’ll do to your community and/or business?
If the answer to one or more of the above is yes, you’ve been headed in the right direction. But, you need to be introduced to the community moderation thoughts around the term Entitlement.
Matt Warburton has been a senior community manager for eBay, Yahoo!, and LinkedIn and has been recently sharing many of the the lessons he learned with other social media developers and media managers. One of his recent presentations, “Voice of the Customer Programs” detailed some of the benefits and challenges of deeply engaging users for product feedback. Though his thoughts were narrowly applied to creating user advisory committees, several of the issues he raise apply more broadly to online communities especially when some users in are given backstage access to product staff and/or special powers to moderate the actions of other users.
From one of Matt’s Voice slides, entitled Best Practices:
- All participants sign an NDA
- Limit tenure of participants
- 12 month tenure recommended
- Fresh perspective
- Avoid behavior problems/entitlement issues
- Remove non-constructive or disruptive users
- Require direct staff interaction in meetings, calls, and discussion forums
- Require all participant inquiries to go through Community team
Matt learned these best practices the hard away while he was at eBay. When they originally set up user advisory councils, which -amongst other things- gave users inside access to development and product management staff. Originally, they didn’t limit the tenure of a user on this council, and this lead to very bad problems as some of the users came to think of themselves as eBay insiders and became troublesome on their message boards. Some of these users would complain bitterly that they weren’t being listened to, or that eBay was not giving appropriate credit, etc.
Entitlement Defined
Experienced community managers describe this effect as user entitlement – when either early adopters or specially selected users are given special access or power, especially indefinitely. This creates a negative feedback environment in the community: new folks come to see it as cronyism and the established users see themselves as the elite and think that they have some measure of control over the company. This can lead to the company being unable to make needed significant changes, paralyzed by fear that the community backlash will cause irreparable harm. By never empowering special users indefinitely, you can help prevent the buildup of entitlement.
I think Matt’s bold bullets above may apply wherever you encounter entitlement – not only in user advisory councils, but whenever users are granted special powers or access either explicitly or implicitly.
Backlash Can Be Good
Yahoo! Finance message boards are a good counterexample – where the backlash is exactly what the company wanted. The message boards were a mess, anti-Semitism, racism, day trader wannabes spreading scandal and lies about companies – consistently this feature of Yahoo! Finance was listed as the worst. When we added threading and reputation, there was a hue and cry from the community: we’d made it less chatty and more about sharing stock information. We lost 25% of our page views immediately as a very small number of active users left the boards for someplace else they could chat the way they liked. But, something amazing happened, the quality of postings jumped significantly. The masses, who were readers – not posters, were able to provide feedback about what was good and what was not, and those who stayed (or started posting because things got better) started carrying on the conversations that we’d originally intended the boards for.
Lines of Control
There are three categories of control over an application/site:
- There are the things the company always decides on its own – These includes issues related to legal juristiction and government compliance, business model prioritization, branding and marketing, and the order that features and bugs will get fixed. The law of law and the budget.
- And there are the things that the community always decides – this usually includes the social customs of the interaction, what’s the most interesting/useful content, and if they will play with you at all. The law of two feet.
- Lastly there is the great in-between, where both the company and the community work together to figure out what is possible and profitable for the majority. This category is where user action is directly related to corporate re-action and vice-versa. Some common forms of this include creating extra content (tags, links, etc.) and user-moderation of other users’ content. This is where much of the gold in social media/online communities is, but it is a balancing act. If you detect entitlement, it’s a sure indicator that this category has become too broad. This is the law of tit-for-tat.
There must be clear lines about what the users can influence and what decisions belong solely to the company and these lines must be made clear on the site and by all staff that interact with users.
Yes! Empower users! But never forget that power should be limited and scope and time, and come with responsibilities on behavior.
Do not fear getting rid of bad apples (as long as you do it consistently) – they don’t really have the power over their peers that they think and they have been driving away even more users that you never hear from!
July 8, 2009
Online Gambling Patent: Another One Bites the Dust
For regular readers of Habitat Chronicles, it comes as no surprise that Lucasfilm’s Habitat, the first graphical virtual world with the first avatars, was the source of much innovation in the field. And this was back in the mid- to late-1980’s before people tried to patent software. As a result, those who created products like these are in some demand when later related patents were filed in the 1990s and now lawsuits a cropping up in an attempt to enforce them.
Another product during that period was called Rabbit Jack’s Casino, which allowed Quantum-Link users to play online gambling games such as Bingo, Poker, Slots, and Blackjack against each other for Q-Pons, chips that were not backed by real dollars, other than the $3.60 to $4.80 an hour people were paying for premium service access.
Rabbit Jack’s played an important role in getting an EU patent on online gambling [EP 0625760B1] declared invalid yesterday. Though I provided three sworn statements about Habitat, in the end the Honourable Lord Lewison did not need to site them in the decision. No matter – I was glad to be of help and to see the process in action.
Another one bites the dust!
March 25, 2009
Amy Bruckman: My selection for Ada Lovelace Day
Sometime circa 1993…
% telnet purple-crayon.media.mit.edu 8888
****************************
** Welcome to MediaMOO! **
****************************
PLEASE NOTE:
MediaMOO is a professional community, where people come to explore the future of media technology.
The operators of MediaMOO have provided the materials for the buildings of this community, but are not responsible for what is said or done in them. In particular, you must assume responsibility if you permit minors or others to access MediaMOO through your facilities. The statements and viewpoints expressed here are not necessarily those of the janitors, Amy Bruckman, or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and those parties disclaim any responsibility for them.
login Randy somepassword
You are in F. Randall "Randy" Farmer's Office. You see a messy desk here.
@who
Player name Connected Idle time Location
----------- --------- --------- --------
Amy (#75) six days an hour Amy's Office
Randy (#???) 00:01 00:00 Randy's Office
@whois Amy
Amy is Amy Bruckman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
@join Amy
...
For those who didn’t know, yesterday was Ada Lovelace’s Birthday, and many of us that have blogs are writing a post about a woman of note in technology. I thought about my selection long and hard, as I know an amazing number of pioneering women doing amazing work who I admire and aspire-to greatly. After much thought, I went with someone in my area of specialization – social media. Someone who has been in the trenches learning about how people interact in real-time for more than 15 years. I chose Amy Susan Bruckman, because we share this particular road: the pursuit of improving mankind’s social interactions using computers and networks as intermediating tools.
Not many people were involved with virtual worlds, graphical or textual, in the late 1980s through 1990s. So few, in fact, that several of us formed something we called the Cyberspace Cabal – Pavel Curtis, Chip Morningstar, Amy Bruckman, and myself (with others joining over the few brief years we corresponded). We were the founders of a group hoping to help pound out the terminology of the future of real-time human computer mediated communications. Then came the World Wide Web in 1993 and over the next few years everything began to change. The Cabal drifted apart.
Most histories of MUD/MOO only give a brief mention to Amy’s first world – MediaMOO, which was established for media researchers to network and share research and best practices. It even served as the testbed for one of the first experiments in virtual community self-governance with the formation of all-user elected ruling council. MediaMOO fostered many other experiments in collaborative object creation that provided many lessons that are echoed in modern virtual worlds such as Second Life today.
Amy carried these insights on into her graduate work at MIT, where she spawned a new derivative of the MOO platform called MOOSE Crossing – designed especially for children to create their own virtual objects, complete with programmable behaviors. In fact, my son created some of his first working code in that world.
Since then, she has moved from MIT to Georgia Tech where continues the good fight for making computers accessible tools for children and the masses by establishing the Electronic Learning Communities lab and the Opportunities in Computing program to house all the great work by her and now her students.
Though she’s already received numerous awards from her peers for being a pioneer in this area, I chose to single her out today for her unwavering and clear focus on the positive benefits on online community and for her continued personal efforts to keep the research community connected.
Thanks for being there Amy! Especially back when most academics were dismissing online community work as being only “by men, for men.”
(See the wikipedia article on her for all the links and details that probably should have been in this tribute.)
AdaLovelaceDay09March 1, 2009
Reputation and Context, March 19th, OCBF in Sonoma
I (Randy) will be leading a session on Reputation and Context at the Online Community Business Forum in Sonoma, Califonia on March 19th and 20th.
My session is currently scheduled to be an hour-long breakout at 2:30 on the 19th. I’m currently thinking of limiting the amount of context-setting material to about 10 minutes and having the rest be a working session for helping people sort out their reputation contexts, models, and abuse mitigation issues. If you’re planning on attending, feedback here about what you’d like to see from my session is strongly desired – leave a comment below or drop me an email.
I’ve attended the ForumOne Community events for several years now and found them to be invaluable. This year should be no exception. The program is still evolving, but already has an impressive list of innovators and stalwarts of Online Communities speaking and leading sessions.
Some seats are still available. Just visit the OCBF Registration page, enter the password sonoma and the discount code farmer at checkout and you will save $150.00
February 17, 2009
FACT CHECK: Lucasfilm's Habitat in Rogue Leaders
Recently, GameSetWatch published an excerpt from Rogue Leaders about Lucasfilm’s Habitat which includes several new images and wonderful details.
Unfortunately, it also contains several factual and categorical errors that need to be corrected in the public record since this book’s account has already been used to incorrectly update Habitat’s Wikipedia page.
This article will block-quote the relevant sections of the book, followed by factual corrections marked as FACT CHECK: or commentary marked with either Chip: or Randy: as appropriate.
Q-Link, as it was known, undercut that price to around $3.60 an hour by renting out spare, unused server space during low-usage times.
FACT CHECK: The underused, and therefore discounted, resource was not servers, but off-peak packet-switching network bandwidth.
Through this partnership a deal was hatched to produce an online game, with Lucasfilm Games creating the front-end game — Habitat — on the Commodore 64, and Q-Link producing the back-end, server-side software.
FACT CHECK: Lucasfilm also developed a large portion of the backend. Q-Link, lead by Janet Hunter, did the stuff that had to interface with their system, but Lucasfilm did the game-specific stuff.
Designer Noah Falstein had been working with one of the team engineers, Chip Morningstar, on the game concept.
Chip: That’s a little backwards. The original concept emerged from a collaboration between Noah and me, but the design itself was mine. We were all peers with the same title, “Designer/Programmer”, with an equal emphasis on concept and implementation.
Randy: See Chip’s post on the beginnings of Habitat for a detailed account those early days.
The game debuted internally at Lucasfilm Games at a company meeting in early 1988.
…
It looked like Habitat was a huge hit-in-the-making, and so in the fall of 1988 the beta was taken to a New York nightclub for a launch party as Lucasfilm Games and Q-Link prepared to revolutionize gaming.
FACT CHECK: Summer and Fall 1986, after the game had first been shown to selected industry and press people at the Chicago CES in June.
Randy: Watch the Habitat Promotional Video and it’s copyright date for verification.
Essentially, if 500 users were so committed to playing Habitat that they remained online long enough to eat up 1 percent of the network’s entire system bandwidth, a full-run production that could attract Rabbit Jack’s Casino numbers could boost that bandwidth number to 30 percent. “The way the system was built, the server software wasn’t capable of hosting that population while still being successful,” recalls Arnold.
Ultimately, these business challenges caused Habitat to be cancelled after the launch party, but before it had gone into full production and reached retail shelves. It would simply be too popular, and the necessary server fix would be too expensive to make the project viable. And so this massively original, inventive, and cutting-edge project was shelved for U.S. release.
From a business perspective, however, Habitat wasn’t a failure. The game was licensed to Fujitsu for use on its FM Towns PC-like platform, and the successor to Habitat was recast (with several of the original planned features now cut) as Corpe Caribe, described as an online Club Med, where it enjoyed some success.
FACT CHECK: The shipped product was Club Caribe, not “Corpe Caribe”. :: sigh ::
Chip: While there were some performance tuning issues that needed to be addressed, the cost of operations was never really the issue. Statements about performance considerations were a face saving way of covering for the what Q-Link perceived as the real problem, which was marketing risk. Basically, the product was so weird and out of the mainstream that they didn’t think they knew how to sell it. In particular, for some reason they felt that people would be put off by the fantasy and science fiction elements. We argued that this defied everything we knew from the history of computer games, but they believed their typical user was far more conventional and unimaginative than the typical game purchaser.
FACT CHECK: Club Caribe was Habitat and it was released commercially by Q-Link. It opened in January 1988 with the name change and a different marketing spin. Literally the only difference between the original Habitat client software and the Club Caribe software as shipped was the title screen image.
Chip: Basically, Q-Link reworked the world database to remove any of the objects that had any kind of fantasy or science fictional flavor. The idea was to make the world seem more ordinary, pitching it as a virtual resort. Notably, they didn’t use any avatar heads that were non-human.
Chip: Over the course of the first six months of operation, as they grew more comfortable with their users, all these pointless restrictions were eventually abandoned.
The licensing to Fujitsu for the FM Towns happened a couple years later.
Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, the two programming gurus who had built the system infrastructure
Chip and Randy: That’s a slight mischaracterization of our role. While we certainly programmed it, we think it’s more noteworthy that Chip designed the whole thing, and Randy ran the world. Both the design itself and our operational experience with it are arguably quite a bit more important to the historical significance of Habitat than was its implementation.
Randy: Well, except that we managed to get a virtual world client shoe-horned into a 1-megahertz, 300-baud, 64k-memory computer with a 165k floppy disk! Certainly not a fact of wide ranging repercussions, but still pretty damn impressive.