Outsmart Weblog : smarter by design

We’ve been in so-called “stealth” mode for the last 12 months developing software for the biggest pain-in-the-you-know-what client — ourselves. The product is called SmallWorlds and in a nutshell it’s a virtual world that runs inside a web browser, without the need to download or install any other software. SmallWorlds brings together the best aspects of online games, instant messaging, social networks and digital media, and wraps them into a persistent 3D virtual world.

SmallWorlds enables users to build their own room, house, or even their own world, and to fill it with a wide variety of items and activities for them and their friends to enjoy together. With online friends and acquaintances, users can share experiences like playing games, watching YouTube videos, listening to their favourite band, browsing through photo galleries, and a whole lot more. You can see a (slightly dated) screenshot of a SmallWorlds room space here.

Today’s New Zealand Herald newspaper republished an article originally written for the inaugural issue of print magazine Startup in December, making this our first online press mention of SmallWorlds. You can read our brief mention here. Our private beta starts next week so hoping for lots more press to come - watch this space.

I’m taking a real-world plane to a Virtual world conference.  I’ve booked my tickets and I’m off in 3 weeks to the Virtual Worlds Fall 2007 Conference in San Jose next month.  All the usual suspects will be there and I’m particularly interested in discussions and presentations involving web-based deployments of Virtual Worlds and the impact of the various facets of Web 2.0 on MMOs and casual gaming.

Coming from a background in Rich Internet Application technology and Web 2.0, I’m curious to see if people have the same sorts of questions, and are seeing the same sorts of opportunities and problems we are considering in the design of our own Virtual World product.  The influence of Web 2.0 seems like a favorite topic of conversation at recent Virtual Goods and Gaming conferences, although the term is typically left rather vaguely or totally defined.

I’ve talked about my own sense of what Web 2.0 means before in A Web 2.0 by any other name where I’ve broken this down into 5 intersecting trends;

1. The web as an application platform

2. The Read Write Web

3. Digital Self-expression

4. Social affiliation

5. Being online vs going online

All of these trends, and one other non-Web 2.0-specific trend not mentioned here - the rise of casual gaming - are incredibly relevant to the emerging interest in Virtual Worlds.

The web as an application platform speaks to the web browser emerging as a favorite platform for hosting Virtual Worlds.  Habbo Hotel, Club Penguin, Gaia and Puzzle Pirates are examples of Web browser plug-in based Virtual Worlds where accessibility trumps high-poly 3D graphics. I’m also really interested to see how existing web content starts to merge, integrate and influence Virtual Worlds and vice-versa.

The Read Write Web is probably the single most core facet of Web 2.0 and is also known by the synonymous terms “The Participatory Web” and “User Generated Content” (UGC).  There’s been a lot of the discussion around UGC in the recent Virtual World and gaming conferences - in particular debates around ownership and quality-of-content control.  Most of these seem to center around user-uploaded content, which is only one form of UGC.  To my mind the more interesting facet of UGC in the context of Virtual Worlds is how powerful but easy-to-use tools can be applied by users to creatively combine primitive elements to create higher-order creations.  Avatar and room builders are obvious examples of this, but there are a multitude of possibilities.

Digital Self Expression (DSE) has been fueled by the huge presence of sites like Myspace and Facebook, and more recently by web-based Avatar builders like Meez.  At the intersection of Virtual Worlds and DSE is a more richly textured canvas where the expression of identity has so much more room to breath.  Together with UGC tools we can expect to see people’s digital identity take on more breadth and subtlety than previously available. 

Social affiliation is the sister of DSE in a world run rife with Social networks, which primarily express affiliation as peer-based relationships (prior to social networks the predominant web-based social affiliation was primarily group/member-based, through membership and participation in mailing lists and web forums).  The next generation of Virtual Worlds are starting to incorporate elements from Social Networks like profile pages and friends lists.  Also to date, digital identity has almost exclusively been expressed as a singularity - ie. each person has only a single identity/avatar.  Will this potentially expand in future Social Network constructs to recognize that most people have the desire to express at least a separate personal and professional persona?

Being online vs going online is the very essence of Virtual Worlds as the Internet and technology gradually digitize more and more of the dimensionality of our experience.  The Synchronous Web, where people meet in real time and virtual space, is the heart of a Virtual World.  In conjunction with always-on-connectivity via web and mobile technologies, presence, interaction and expression - no matter where you are - are becoming more and more universal and immersive in our daily lives.  Again this trend testifies to the significance of the web as the ideal Virtual World platform with its universal accessibility and intrinsic connectivity.

The rise of casual gaming is not strictly a recognized element of Web 2.0 but it is none-the-less a very strong growth trend at present.  Products like the extremely successful Nintendo Wii console, and the increasing recognition of the significant part that web-based casual games and game portals play in many many peoples lives are testimony that gaming is going mainstream.  Who would have thought that women in their forties comprise the typical casual game player?

All in all a really exciting time for Virtual World developers, end-users and everyone in-between.  I’m looking forward to meeting fellow Virtual World explorers in San Jose.  Also, to any VCs reading this, we’ll be looking for funding post-launch in late 2007 so drop me a line if you’re interested in investments in this space.  

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb asks what can we expect from the next 10 years on the web?  My first response was that he was a braver man than most to try to project that far into the future, with technology evolving at its current rate.  Whilst I considered a few of his arguments & examples a little weak, I thought that his overall trend selection was pretty good, albeit with a few significant omissions.

“Top 10″ lists are fun but are significantly more powerful when based on an underlying model.  The value in a good model is that it can transform data from being specifically descriptive to being more universally prescriptive.  To my mind the essential meta-trend (or perhaps mega-trend) of the web is that it is becoming more real. “Hmmm…. what’s that mean?” you ask.  Well, lets look at some of the meanings of “real”.

• not imaginary
• more tangible
• capable of being treated as fact
• reflecting the genuine character of something

All of these definitions speak to a general trajectory from loosely formed, more abstract & less direct forms of representation and expression to those which are more tangible, immediate, cohesive & sensate.  I’ve spoken of these trends many times before, for instance here & here.

This meta-trend of increasing real-ness is currently manifesting itself in 4 ways;

1. helping us to connect to more meaningful content
2. helping us participate in real-time shared experiences
3. helping us entertain ourselves and each other
4. helping us explore & express our identity

Lets look at each of these points in more detail.

1. Helping us connect to more meaningful content

Through technologies such as RSS, the tracking of attention data, the harnessing of collective intelligence, and improvements in search & matching algorithms, we are steadily improving our ability to lay our hands on more personally relevant information, plus participate in more rewarding online relationships.  In short, we are improving the signal-to-noise ratio between ourselves and that which has meaning or value to us.  This is helping us build more fact- & value-aligned versions of our areas of concern and interest.  Growing sub-trends to note in this area are the increasing use of Attention data (Richard’s Trend 5) & further efforts to make our web experience more “me”-centric (Trend 10).  Social bookmarking and Social news are the strongest examples of these trends. The key point of improvements in this area is that they transform the latent potential of data and relationships into actual value - ie. making them more real. 

2. Helping us participate in real-time shared experiences

One of the key facets of Web2.0 is the so-called participatory or read-write web - in short the shift from traditional authority-authored monologues to community-authored dialogues. These “conversations” have been predominantly asynchronous to date - ie. the conversations occur “out of time” - that is, the conversationalists don’t share time together like we would if you & I were talking together on the phone.  With the meta-trend of increasing real-ness comes the movement towards the Synchronous Web whereby social and informational interactions on the web occur in real-time.  IRC & Instant messaging are basic examples of synchronous communication which have been around for a long time, but to date have not made significant inroads into the basic underlying infrastructure of the web. In the next 12 months we can expect to see a growing number of web-based applications and services that provide a venue in which shared digitally-mediated experiences are synchronized in time.  Outsmart is currently working on 3 projects in this area in both business and consumer-focused domains.  One of the strongest examples of growth in this trend in the consumer domain is Virtual worlds (Richard’s Trend 3).  The key point of the Synchronous Web is that it brings conversations into the same time-space, and in doing so not only imbues them with the more subtle aspects of what we take for granted in our real-world interactions, but also facilitates experiences that are not otherwise possible.

3. Helping us entertain ourselves

I recently read Iain Banks’ book “The Player of Games” on the recommendation of my business partner Darren Green.  The book is set in the future where humankind’s basic needs are now all met, and where leisure time, in particular play & entertainment, make up most of people’s use of time.  This “thought experiment” struck me as quite profound in that it reflected to me something true about our make-up as human beings - playing & being entertained is a core part of our fundamental nature.  If I asked every person who read this blog article what they would do if they could do anything I am confident that a majority would choose to do something in the domain of play or entertainment.  Entertainment is well subscribed to in current web trends in the plethora of video-based Youtube clones & the rise of Internet TV (Richards Trend 7). What Richard misses though is the bustling casual gaming market which is growing in leaps and bounds (although there’s obviously some cross-over with Virtual worlds - Trend 3).  The key point of the growth trend in the domain of entertainment - in particular interactive entertainment - is that it helps us tap into more of our creative & immersive potential and in doing so you might say makes us feel more real to ourselves.

4. Helping us explore & express our identity

Social networking is the intersection of digital identity and social affiliation and sites like Myspace & Facebook with their 100,000+ new users each day testify to this huge social phenomenon. The most interesting aspect of this movement in my opinion is the idea that the web is acting as a medium through which people are experimenting with the very fabric of their own identity. The very act of expressing one’s identity on our own profile page and then seeing it reflected back on the web can help to solidify for ourselves a more articulate sense of self.  While many see this trend as evidence of an unhealthy narcissism, I believe that it is an important stage of development as we experiment to learn more of who we are (& who we aren’t).  I believe then that in a very significant sense, social networking helps us to become more real to ourselves and one another. 

Closing

My own personal interest in looking at and trying to understand trends is to leverage potential insight into the ground-swell that underlies them, with the hope of being able to capitalize on anticipating more of the form of the future.  This is a core part of the value we bring to the partnerships with our clients.  I feel very excited about this emerging ground-swell of increasing virtuality and “real-ness”.  Gradually more and more of the essential aspects of real-world representation is being encoded and digitized.  The potential value these sub-trends bring individually, and even more so collectively, is to make for the creation of a more compelling Internet. One in which ourselves, our valued relationships, our valued interests and conversations, and the spaces in which we meet together are rendered in richer & more life-like detail.  Somewhere out there are the NextBigThings that incorporate and perhaps integrate these trends.  What do you think that might look like? 

We have been so incredibly busy in the last few months & as usual our website & blog are the most expend-ably neglected. “Update case studies” has been on my task list since January but there always seems to be a higher priority.  Anyway, I just arrived into the office this morning to an email from Adobe;

Great! (& thanks Adobe also for the impetus to finally update at least our blog). 

Thanks especially to our client Greg Janecka for selecting Outsmart to build his dream. Mortgage News 2.0 is a social news site for the mortgage industry.  It takes numerous RSS feeds from all over the Internet and using a combination of advanced filtering, user customization and the tracking of rating and attention data, presents to the reader the most relevant, up-to-date and comprehensive source of mortgage industry news available anywhere.

Technology-wise we built the site using Flex for the UI together with a server-side PHP-based RSS Aggregator.  A context-sensitive advertising engine enables Greg to provide his client’s with well-targeted advertising. 

I personally really enjoyed working with Greg to help him refine his product concept and feel proud of what we came up with together, and the superb implementation of our design and development team. 

Ryan Stewart of ZDNet (and now Adobe’s latest Tech evangelist - congrats Ryan) posts about “Making business apps more like video games” in his latest Universal Desktop article. He asks the question “Will business apps evolve to incorporate video game-like interfaces?”.

I think for sure, led I believe by B2C (Business to Consumer) RIAs. For instance as we start to see more “Rich Retail” RIAs (nextgen web-based shopping sites & shop-browsing engines) an obvious enhancement is the virtualization & rich visualization of navigation - ie. being able to move through a virtual store to find and compare the goods we are interested in buying.

What non-gaming applications are starting to borrow from gaming applications is what I see as an aspect of a general trajectory from what are currently called “Rich Internet Applications” to what might be called “Rich Internet Experiences”. The articulation of this difference can be subtle but I personally see it evidenced by;

• Representationally & visually richer UIs (3D, video, rich media)
• The technology being more transparent
• Greater interactivity
• “Show, don’t tell”
• Something that engages the senses first and the intellect second
• The maximization of visual cues that create the sense of participation in virtual analogies to real-life experience

Some simple examples of experientially-richer UI artifacts include;

• chat bubbles vs. text chat window
• emoticons
• WYSIWYG
• avatars vs. presence list
• (3D) spaces vs. 2D pages

What video games are pushing the boundaries on is the “show don’t tell” mantra.  The value in this for business applications and their users is that they make the navigation and comprehension of the applications more accessible.  Technologies such as 3D are now becoming more reachable and in conjunction with the rich expressiveness of development tools like Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight, it is not going to be long before we see Business apps incorporating much richer video-game-like representation.

There are lots of interesting developments going on in the Web2.0 space at present and the underlying technology supporting this.  In working with leading web entrepreneurs and innovators we get an elevated perspective across many web-based products and service domains, and thereby get to see trends and common themes that may not be obvious to somebody working from a single perspective. From here we’re seeing the convergence of a number of trajectories;

• 3D virtualisation of space & real-time shared experience
• Increasing richer User generated content
• Social Affiliation & Identity expression

Where these trends meet are a number of interesting product & service possibilities where compelling social and entertainment experiences can be virtualised and brought to life. Over the last year we have been building a technology platform that supports the next generation of web-based products in this emerging territory. At the inaugural NZ Flex Developers Group which we hosted earlier this week we gave an early preview of a developer “test-rig” that demonstrates the beginnings of our OSVirtualVillage platform.

Over on our new Labs site you can see some screenshots of this - we’ll also be releasing a link to the real thing in the next week. Over the next month or so we’ll be gradually revealing more of OSVirtualVillage, and demonstrating how the immersive experience of 3D, combined with the accessibility of Flash Player, and the power and speed of development of Adobe Flex can create stunning new worlds.

I always admire good taste and it’s especially easy to admire Ryan Stewart’s excellent assessment of what he considers the top 3 Flex development studios in the world seeing as how we’re listed . Thanks Ryan for the recognition. And you aint see nothing yet. Over the last few months we have been building what I am sure will become benchmark sites for Rich Internet Applications. In the next month or so we will be releasing some case studies that demonstrate what we do best in pushing the edge on creating unique and innovative value delivery wrapped up in compelling user interaction.

Recognition of being in the top 3 is very satisfying as it affirms what our clients and partners have been telling us, but bring on that #1 spot. And Ted - having met up at Webdu and now that you know we exist, we hope to be included in your next list.

Darren and I are 30 minutes or so off boarding a plane to the Webdu conference in Sydney.  It’s been a jolly long time since we last posted anything there - too long!  In some ways it almost feels true to say that the hour we’ve had here waiting in the departure lounge is the first opportunity to come up for breath in the last while.  These last few months have seen significant project activity and growth at Outsmart HQ. 

• We’ve completed several significant projects for clients, and started on a few more (more on this later)
• We’ve started work on our own immersive 3D Virtual world platform, as well as a multi-service peer-to-peer engine  (very cool!)
• We’ve added several more super talented interaction and development engineer-artists to our team
• We’ve built and moved into cool new offices complete with vital essentials such as foosball table, coffee machine, cafe seating, Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3 game consoles (strictly for UI research of course)

Over the next few weeks I hope to find some more time to update our site with more detail on our most recent projects, and special updates on our development in the 3D and P2P space. 

Adobe ran a competition earlier this year looking for the coolest Flex applications. Using a points system, the panel compared each submission on the following criteria:

• Originality
• Ease of use
• Design
• Use of Flex features

Unfortunately entries were only open to US developers so even though we had 2 or 3 applications that we would have liked to have submitted we weren’t able to compete.  Our Aussie cousins across the “ditch” obviously complained (never backwards in coming forwards bless their souls) and so the Australian Flex Developer Derby was created.  But once again we were prevented from directly entering as entry was limited to Australians.  Fortunately (and unbeknownst to us) one of our Australian clients MobiMarketing, for whom we developed the gofreeSMS RIA, entered and it was a pleasant surprise today to find that we had won the “Communication/collaboration applications” section.

Thank you Alistair for entering gofreeSMS and thank you Outsmart Lead Developer Nathan Smith for crafting this cool little app.