Google have this philosophy of putting products into beta early in the development phase and ironing out the problems as they go. It’s not going to work with Lively in the virtual world/game space. People are not going to come back. Ask the owners of Second Life. They lose 9/10 people who try it and those 9 do not come back. Despite its dumbed down functionality, Lively will lose at least 9.

Rooms are supposed to contain 20 avatars. Mostly they close with about 12 and lag badly.

People in the environment have NO IDEA what they’re meant to do. What’s worse, there IS nothing to do, other than chat. A large number of people are 14 years old, speak different languages or lag so badly they cannot communicate. Believe me, there’s not a lot of chemistry in there. Didn’t Google study the Second Life orientation experience?

Most of the people I was able to communicate with had computer problems in Lively and were Facebook users. The idea that people are going to migrate their friends’ network across from Facebook is just fanciful. Only one in three are going to have sufficient graphics grunt and bandwidth to make it run tolerably. What are they going to do, stay in Facebook with all their friends or jump across to Lively leaving most of their friends behind? That was a rhetorical question.

I went into Vivaty as well but after it insisted on re-installing the software it packed up completely. Able to display only one room of those I tried. Like Heidi said in her comment; Just Starting.

Pictured: Me in Lively, streaming Lisa Nova’s Twitter Whore video into my room, Twittery.

Lively is described as Google’s answer to Second Life. It’s not. Second Life is a virtual world; Lively is chat software with 3D avatars. It’s browser-based, as opposed to Second Life, which operates with separate software, like a computer game. Contrasting the two environments highlights the originality of the Second Life product. Lively is imitative and cut-down in every respect. Conceptually barren. This is by intention; the Second Life interface has proved too daunting for most people. I note that they used to think that computers were too complicated for the mainstream too.

The interesting aspect of Lively is the ability to embed the interface in a web page, effectively offering interactive 3D chat on a web site. For a business, this has the same limitations of normal chat software, ie it only works if you allocate staff to interact with people. Kind of the opposite to what businesses tend to want these days. You can imagine teleseminars and teleconferences working this way, if they get the wrinkles ironed out.

And there are a lot of wrinkles. It’s painfully slow. There is no orientation. Things don’t work. Movement is difficult. Thousands of bad first impressions are being created as you read this. This is no way to run a ballroom.

My friends at Millions of Us are one of two development partners and have created a themed room for one of their clients, National Geographic. So; themed rooms, limit of 20 visitors at a time: looks like a similar scaling problem to Second Life’s.

Lively’s launch has overwhelmed another entrant in this space. Vivaty. It is easier to understand, is less ambitious than Lively and seems to work better, though I haven’t seen it under load.

Vivaty also allows you to embed your room in a web page (coincidence). Like Lively, it offers to suck you across from Facebook (just a coincidence). Quite an unsettling experience walking into your Vivaty room for the first time to find the walls covered with pictures of people you know. It loads pictures randomly from your Facebook account.

But most people I know don’t dwell in Facebook. It’s a ‘touch base’ medium. This is at odds with the 3D chat idea, which is conversation. I would have thought the concept was a better fit with MSN than Facebook.

Always risky making an assessment early on, but here goes. Lively will disappoint almost everyone who ventures into it, will get a reputation as nothing special and die of embarrassment. Vivaty will struggle to move people across from Facebook in sufficient numbers to give it traction. Both are kludgy and compare poorly to their 2D rivals.

Not through to the next round.

IBM and Second Life have announced the ability to teleport from Second Life into Open Sim grids (an open source version of Second Life). They describe this as a first; well, my business partner Loki Clifton and others have been doing that stuff for six months. The big guys may have improved the scalability or reliability, but it is not a first and they know it. Must they lie to us?

Linden Lab hope to turn Second Life into a platform rather than a product. One that respects people’s intellectual property, allows transfer of assets and maintains LL’s control of the virtual currency. The benefit to corporates of Open Sim however, is that the virtual world can be SEPARATED from Second Life, avoiding the morality and security issues that send men in business suits scurrying into mouse holes.

The elephant in the room (nicely sustaining the metaphor here) is that the Open Sim versions allow other people to sell ‘virtual land’, currently LL’s major source of income. Already land is being sold at a fraction of the Second Life price. Undermining your own profitability is one of the less successful business strategies. The road to survival for Second Life probably involves transactional fees of some sort. Dare I say ‘tax’.

The ongoing problem for Linden Lab is the lack of platform stability. It crashes and it lags. Assets created within the virtual world are not stable. The monetary system is not stable. I lost several hundred dollars one week and I still don’t know why. Reporting these errors does not lead to remedial action or even attention.

Unless IBM can dig LL out of its technical hole, (unfortunately it’s a development partnership, not a rescue package) the thing doesn’t scale and business is not interested. IBM will host its own Second Life servers for clients; I wonder how solid they will be. I wonder how expensive they will be.

Although I’ve invested lots of time in Second Life and I believe that 3D virtual worlds will be a powerfully disruptive media in the future, I’m writing it off for the time being.

The ABC are advertising their Local Radio stations on the teev. Fair enough. The ad features snatches of audio from a range of different programs and a fairly static visual background. It’s dreadfully unappealing.

When you watch television, and this will come as a shock to most of you, your brain is expecting visual stimulation. Colour and movement. And for the most part, it expects the visual to match the audio. If the lip sync is wrong, the brain doesn’t like it.

With television your visual centres demand movement. So certain kinds of static or slow moving programming don’t work that well. Parkinson for example. Television requires rapid cuts. Even the News now hardly shows ‘head of newsreader’. It cuts away to story and graphic over and over. Constantly capturing our attention with the next flicker of change. It’s packetised: eye grabs. We don’t really have programs any more, just non-stop cut-through.

When you listen to radio, your visual attention is not called for so you can move freely in space. Because you’re less constrained your imagination paints a picture that fills in the gaps. As a result, a well told story can be more powerful on radio than on television. When you watch television, the brain is largely occupied interpreting visual stimulus. When you listen to radio, the brain is more free to imagine.

So, given that radio is a different experience, how do you convey that? The current TV ad presents radio as an inferior version of TV. All the audio but nothing to look at. Playing radio sound grabs on television is like promoting a newspaper on television by showing photographs of news articles.

Three ideas:

1. Film people talking. Just because the audience can’t see the DJ while listening doesn’t mean you can’t show them the DJ talking to someone in a studio. It’s TV advertising. Give them a TV experience.

2. Black the screen while you run the audio. This will make people listen differently. Use a full 60 seconds telling a story. Or longer.

3. Interview people about what they’ve heard on radio. Talk about content. Radio programming is far more diverse than TV; that’s one of its strengths. ‘Did you hear that interview with the Jewish journalist who went around interviewing terrorist leaders?’ ‘Did you hear about the Canadian Government giving Australia the oldest document ever printed in Australia?’ ‘Did you hear about the garden of blue sticks?’ ‘Did you hear that program about the blogger who can’t stop criticising the ABC?’ No wait, that last one was the Internets.

“Each morning, the Maori people of New Zealand, which is part of Australia, rise at dawn, cook some eggs, put on their grass skirts and go out to the fields to make 42 below vodka.” It’s the start of a pretty cute 42 Below vodka advertisement that was banned on the web, radio and newspaper by the New Zealand Advertising Standards Authority in 2003.

It was banned because it encouraged immoderate consumption of liquor, was culturally offensive to Maoris, suggested the consumption of liquor in hazardous situations and associated the alcoholic product with ‘identifiable heroes of the young’, to wit Russell Crowe and the All Blacks. The joke about Sydney, New Zealand was not a factor. I wish I’d thought of that joke.

Anyway, the ad was banned; why is it still available? It came to me via an email with a link to the web site; the web site of 42 Below. The email I received referred to the ban; ie the ban is being used to enhance the appeal of the ad. Did the company or its agencies initiate this viral email campaign? If so, they should be brought to account.

If industry accepts the need for advertising standards it must not ignore rulings or seek to use adverse findings for promotional advantage.

No. One of the main reasons for the growth of the Internet is its phenomenal diversity compared to alternative media. Imposing content restrictions would reduce diversity instead of furthering the internationalisation of the Australian media. If we are to review regulatory policy, we should aim to participate on the world stage rather than “protect the Australian culture”, as he puts it. Is he worried we might not get another series of Big Brother? There is no reference I can see in the ABC’s charter to “protecting the Australian culture”.

He speaks of the “risk of our culture being lost under a tide of cheap-to-access overseas programming”. Culture is dynamic, it’s something that evolves. Not something you put in a box and protect. Don’t panic: we’re not going to lose it. The focus should be on helping Australians export ‘cheap-to-access overseas programming’ not on protecting us from it.

The Internet is awash with foreign culture and that’s the good news. Let’s not devote too much energy to reinforcing our differences.

And you don’t get ‘better culture’ by paying more money. Dalton is confusing culture with production values.

I’m thinking by the way that he should be acknowledged for one of the year’s best understatements: “Although Mr Dalton admits regulating the online industry is problematic…”.

Enforcing Australian content restrictions on television stations was understandable in the days of three commercial television stations and one public network. Limited bandwidth. But it is an anachronism in a market with unlimited channels and unlimited choices. The people are voting for choice. Get your outdated bureaucratic hands off our internet.

New world wine-makers like Australia re-defined the business 20 years ago when they introduced the economies of machine harvesting and scientific principles into wine making. Victims of their own success: they made cheap wines better. Yellow Tail and Jacobs Creek became big brands in the US and the UK, and the market went ‘great! I can get quality bottled wine for US$5 dollars’. But that’s not where the profit is for wine makers.

So explain to me now why I should pay $20 a bottle for a better wine. That’s a hard sell. Let’s explore a few scenarios:

Marketer: You should pay $20 because this is an older wine, with more fruit intensity.
Consumer: It looks the same as the $5 bottle, just has a different year on it. How do I know it’s better?

Marketer: You should pay $20 because this is a better brand than the $5 bottle.
Consumer 1: It’s the same brand I buy for $5 a bottle. It just has a different bin number on it.
Consumer 2: How do I know that’s a better brand? I’ve never heard of it.
Consumer 3: There are hundreds of brands here. How the hell do you expect me to know which ones are better?

Marketer: You should pay $20 because this wine won a Gold Medal
Consumer: I bought a $5 bottle the other day; that won a Gold Medal too. Get a life! Most of those bottles over $20 don’t have any stickers on them.

Marketer: You should pay $30 because this is a restaurant
Consumer: Thanks very much for charging me $30 - I spend $8 when I buy the same wine in my bottle shop. It certainly demonstrates that paying more money gets me a better product.

If Fosters were a marketing-orientated company they would have picked up these attitudes and altered their marketing. They haven’t.

They needed to address the confusion over quality. As the owner of a portfolio of brands they could have introduced an internal ranking system and promoted that. Yes, the Penfolds Bin 389 won a Gold Medal in 2003. But it is only the 9th best shiraz we made that year. And it’s only drinking at 23/100 compared to the 1964 Grange.

And when I go to a bottle shop, instead of the 20%-off per case, which seems to be the only marketing promotion these guys ever use, why can’t I buy a vertical pack of the same variety? 2001, 2003, 2005. Let me see for myself how good the 2001 is.

I can see no evidence that Foster’s have used any social software to increase involvement of wine drinkers. Why can’t their consumers use the web and mobile technology to communicate with each other and the company about wine? Is this not a social product? Why have they not developed an International Wine Wankers Game?

And where is the packaging innovation? Why can I not buy single serve wine? I’d love to be able to go on a picnic and take two sachets of sparkling, one chardonnay, one riesling and a dessert wine instead of being locked in to one big heavy bottle. You can treat wine like a commodity and you’ll get commodity prices or you can look for a deeper understanding of consumer’s attitudes and the nature of the product. They will lead to more profitable product differentiation.

From the Foster’s web site: “We believe in placing the consumer and the customer at the heart of everything we do”. *Rolls eyes*. *Reaches for a drink*.

Lamity is a new virtual world on a mobile phone platform. It’s built on Google’s Open Source software, Android. Lamity is about to launch in Japan, the world’s most sophisticated mobile phone environment. The company (whose slogan translates into English as ‘the enjoyments between man and man’) say you can put 400 avatars in the one ‘town’ which compares favourably to Second Life. But this is specious, since the small screen and the limited navigational ability of Lamity won’t give you any meaningful sense of togetherness. It’s a very limited 3D environment.

The platform allows your avatar (and others) to view web pages in-world. This is also not a very big deal. If I want to view a web page I want full web navigability. I don’t want two little avatars standing in front of it.

Thirdly, you can view movie previews in-world. Walk your avatar into a cinema and activate the screen. Once again, if I want to see a movie preview I don’t want to have to navigate another interface to get to it. You can watch movies in Second Life too but a movie is a 2D experience. If you’re watching it inside a 3D environment your brain wants one or the other. If the principal narrative is in 2D, that’s where your focus will be. May as well watch that in full screen mode.

I’m not saying virtual worlds can’t work on a mobile platform but I think instead of creating imitations of existing virtual world platforms developers need to design for the small screen. It’s big enough for one or two faces. That would be a good place to start.

The ABC has always been Amateur Hour on grooming. Its station promotions are the other weakness; sickly imitations of the commercial networks’ urgent demands for attention. I’m not suggesting they get better at copying commercial style promotions. Quite the reverse. The problem is an unwillingness to experiment with alternative advertising formats - testimonials, mash-ups, pointers, cross-promotion and snatches. Spare us the insult of needless repetition.

Although their programs treat the audience with great respect, (it’s so nice not to be talked down to) the advertisements they use to promote those programs remain formulaic in scheduling and format. Perhaps there remains some distaste for the notion of advertising, even if it is advertising one’s own excellent content.

ABC Radio National has had tremendous success with Podcasting. But they continue to promote only the forthcoming week’s programs. They could now promote all the content that exists on their web site as well (usually four weeks’ worth of history). Some more creativity in promotion would be welcome. The bad hair we can live with.