Through my association with Jared Freedman and Code4software.com I found out about two new developments in Virtual Worlds Analytics that have been flying under the radar but could have far reaching impact, down the line, to many other fields.   Some of my readers may remember that the metrics developed for IBM‘s Second Life Business Center, the metrics strategy which I helped craft, was the most advanced in the world in 2007 - it probably still is (merging site analytics, questionnaire data, Virtual Analytics and in house databases in one report).

First, Linden Labs released HTTP-In and LSL Communications on July 7th, which allows “…allows LSL scripts to respond to http requests made by other servers – or even other LSL scripts”.    As Jared Freedman explained it to me, yesterday, it is now possible to pass query string parameters directly to objects within as Second Life Sim and have them respond, individually.  Here’s an example:

http://sim3536.agni.lindenlab.com:12046/cap/c975e835-1c6d-c8b7-39be-1dc63a088e5d/?foo=bar&some=thing

As each object (say a jar or kiosk in a Virtual Sim) has a unique address – the object can be updated from a web browser.        The capabilities haven’t been released to the entire Virtual World community in Second Life, yet, but soon will be, and it appears to be working very well.

Why would that be important?

Because Second Life has a visualization and interactive capabilities that are superior to most of what’s on the 2D web, the problem is that up to now, Virtual Worlds didn’t tend to scale well.   Think Omniture writing a Web Analytics Visualization to a Sim in Second Life, or a Social CRM application that wrote changes to a “Virtual Room” which the most important changes being closer to you – concepts and information that are difficult to verbalize but can be represented pictorially and in 3D Space.   The applications for Medicine and Education are abundant, but also exist for Marketing and Social Media.

Up till HTTP-In and LSL Communications it was much harder to update Virtual World Sims with 2D web information – bandwidth wise – it required continuous polling – it wasn’t easy, in other words.  Recently, it was said that Social Media is succeeding because it’s easy to do – (at least, it’s easy to participate in Social Media), and the “ease” part is what makes this development particularly interesting, as it could have been accomplished before, but with much more effort.

But the problem remained – a lot of companies don’t want to share their data with Linden Labs – much the way many people now share their analytics data with Google (via  Google Analytics); corporations like IBM want Second Life Visualization capabilities, but they want it behind their firewalls.   Well, now, that is possible, and it’s different than the “open grid” that has been in place for the last year or so.

Code named “Nebraska” Second Life Lives Behind a Firewall was first announced a few months ago (last April, to be exact) by Linden Labs

“…. Today, we’re pleased to share that the stand-alone version of Second Life solution is currently in the alpha phase. We have nine alpha installations in the field at organizations such as IBM, Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), New Media Consortium (NMC), Intel, and Northrop Grumman. And, we’re planning to go into a limited closed beta phase this summer with general availability later this year.

Yes, this is a server solution that is completely disconnected from the main Second Life environment with all of the rich functionality in the box.”

The two developments, HTTP-In and LSL Communications joined with Second Life Lives Behind a Firewall now make it possible to build easily up-datable and interactive visualization, virtual worlds, under control and with full ownership of a corporation.

Here’s some possible applications.

Individuals:

Your own virtual world that gets updated with information you collect via RSS, Friendfeed, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, continually.    Your friends can visit your space and interact (even when your not “there”).

Healthcare:

Hospitals can have their own virtual rooms for patients that are updated with their medical history – since it’s behind the firewall, no problem with privacy.   Teaching can also be done in the same way.

Marketing:

Corporations can make their own virtual rooms, behind their firewalls, and customers can interact, via Social Media, using a Web Browser, without actually having to enter the Virtual World Sim.     Concepts are hazy as yet as I’m wrapping my mind around the possibilities.

Analytics:

As mentioned earlier, the visualizations created by Omniture Discover 2 and Visual Sciences, along with Coremetrics and Google Analytics, are rudimentary compared to what virtual worlds are capable of .   Using an open API, Analytics packages could easily write data to a private visualization of site analytics running on a clients’ site – again, behind the firewall, so the data is protected.   Because of the nature of Analytics, having a two way dialog with the data might be possible and easier using a Virtual World interface than a static, 2D web interface currently used on all platforms.

Social Media

I recently published a post in Entrepreneur.com titled “Track Your Tweets” talking about how easy it is for businesses to track their twitter traffic and how they should – but the visualization part could be far more developed in conjunction with a Virtual World Sim – Social CRM and Social Data-mining can best be visualized in a 3D Virtual World – see Unbound Technology – Social Media mining interview with Brian Killen.

It’s also true that People with Passion fuel Social Media but they want more interaction than what Second Life had to offer, which as it was mentioned, was very “lonely” – but with Nebraska and Http In, updating these worlds is going to become much easier and more accessible from the 2D Web, in ways that we have yet to develop, but soon will.

” … Second Life, which would have benefited from a few more boundaries (virtually geographically speaking). Second Life offers so much space there simply aren’t enough people to occupy it, so it becomes very lonely very quickly. Really, there’s nothing more depressing than wandering around an enormous Second Life mall and being the only one there.

Public Relations

I think it’s fair to say you can create campaigns for customers like Coke, Pepsi, Dell, American Cancer Society, etc – that are in Virtual Worlds and get much more “engagement” out of it, from visitors.  TechCrunch wrote recently about the valuation of Linden Labs Second Life – Does Anybody Still Use Second Life? And If So, How Much Is It Worth Today? where it was said…

” …. In average time spent per user per week, Second Life in fact trounces all other MMORPGs, including World of Warcraft and Civilization IV. In another testament to the service’s apparent stickiness, the number of hours users spend on Second Life has been increasing steadily and is currently at historic highs, totaling approximately 124 million hours in the first quarter of this year.

More importantly, Next Up says in-world transactions have recovered after a significant drop in September 2007 – when gambling was banned in the virtual world – and has been steadily increasing ever since December 2007.”

Suppose, with the new capabilities of HTTP-In and LSL Communications paired with “Nebraska” or  Second Life Lives Behind a Firewall these campaigns become much easier to do, much easier to update, and with metrics capabilities pioneered by Code4Software and advertising capabilities (with full metrics) available in the  Code4′s AdSoft package, you could fully update and track total visitation and engagement in these Virtual Sims that ran behind a firewall.

Mobile Marketing and Social Networking

Right now, my friends at Communities Dominate Brands believe Mobile is the 7th Mass Media, they’re probably right, as we all do more on our mobile phones now, pretty much, than on our laptops, and the trend will only continue.   What’s not considered is how well all of this “interaction” is visualized in an actionable way.  Right now, it’s possible to interface Virtual Worlds to Mobile Phones -and even, possibly, run clients for some of them, from say, an iPhone.    But what about updating the Virtual World from an iPhone – a private world – a private social network, a private room?

Sure, it could be done – but it was too hard ….. not any longer.

The next steps are to start seeing the practical applications of these new developments – my goal with this post was to raise awareness of them in the analytics and social media communities.