Avatars should come out of the closet

Lots of people think about a better user interface (UI) for Second Life these days. There are the folks at Linden Lab, who are preparing, as CEO Mark Kingdon explained, an expandable interface, which grows with the experience of the user. There is Dusan Writer, who organized a User Interface Design Contest. The winner will be announced at a special edition of the Metanomics show. Prokofy Neva spoke out on his blog Second Thoughts in No, It’s Not Really About the User Interface, stressing the importance of the Search (or, more appropriately, the Find) function.

I felt reluctant to speak out about these issues, I am not a technologist. I do believe however that among the greatest assets of Second Life are the communities and sub-communities in that world. It seems obvious that changes in UI helping people to find communities and groups of people sharing the same passions, are crucial to increase the appeal of Second Life. But this does not only depend on the people of Linden Lab. Maybe more avatars should come out of the closet and unveil the identities of their real life typists, even to the point of giving detailed insight into what those typists are doing.

Recently I attended the vBusiness Expo, a conference about the use of virtual worlds for collaboration in business and professional life. Stephen Prentice of Gartner told the audience that the connectivity with the real world and the rest of the internet will be more important than hyper realism. Chris Badger, VP at Forterra, told us that his company is developing the possibility to link avatars with the information available on 2D-social networks (like LinkedIn of Lotus Connections). This would be a very useful tool to find out about other people in-world and would facilitate interaction a lot.

At that same conference, Professor Tony O'Driscoll (Duke University) said how crucial tagging is in a web2.0 context:

Pretty much everything created and stored in the Web 2.0 domain (people,profiles and content) is TAGGED. This means that contextually relevant knowledge through people or content is much more easily or even serendipitously encountered.

Just imagine tag clouds linked with individuals. This would go far beyond the LinkedIn-link with an avatar. The tag cloud would give you a good feel what that particular individual did last week for instance, giving you the possibility to connect much more easily. It would lead to “dynamic knowledge discovery”. So one could imagine avatars in Second Life, not only unveiling their real life personae, but also generating tag clouds, giving other avatars insight in what they are doing, making it a lot easier to identify others working on the same kind of projects.

There is something in Second Life and other virtual worlds which makes avatars reluctant to unveil real life information, while this seems not to be the case on 2D-networks such as LinkedIn or Facebook. The reason is obvious, one observer told me: "to put it bluntly, people don't have sex on Facebook".

This however does not explain everything. Many avatars I know in communities such as Metanomics do not unveil the names of their real life typists, but they don't really hide those identities: it takes a few clicks to know who the real life persona of Beyers Sellers is, or the real life person behind Olando7 Decosta. But we still feel reluctant to share that information in an immediate way in our Second Life profiles.

This, rationally speaking, makes no sense. Being a journalist I know that one can not be "a little bit in the newspaper", or "a little bit public". So there is no advantage in being "a little bit public", it only makes life more difficult.

Turning the profiles to even more useful instruments for networking and knowledge discovery, is partly a job for Linden Lab (for instance providing a possibility to generate tag clouds) but als requires a change in the mindset of us, residents. Of course, maybe intermediate solutions could be imagined, such as the possibility to show more complete profiles to members of the same group. It goes without saying that every avatar should have the possibility to keep her identity hidden or not to use features such as tag clouds.

Or would all this be so at odds with Second Life culture that it would be inconceivable? Is there a confrontation here between the rather augmentionist use of virtual worlds to collaborate outside as well as inside the virtual environment, and the more immersionist vision of people who want to fully explore another persona, without being bothered by considerations regarding their real life identity? And if such a confrontation exists, could we not create an interface which adapts itself to both groups of avatars?