Social Networking in Virtual Worlds- Part 1
With the emergence and ever-growing popularity of social media I thought it only proper to address social media influences and uses within a virtual world application.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, let me provide you with the Wikipedia definition of Social Media: “Social media is information content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It’s a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologue (one to many) into dialog (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal and business. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM)”.
While the majority of technology users have heard of Facebook, Twitter and MySpace (and most of us are probably guilty of using at least one of these applications, if not all) how will they integrate or influence interactions within a virtual world? 3D chat within a virtual world currently is an option in a handful of VW’s. However, will they become mainstream in the future?
Some Quick Stats:
-Twitter still continues to grow despite constant outages and other issues. In fact Nielsen reported in October 2008 that Twitter is growing as much as 343% in 12 months.
-Facebook is now growing by about 600,000 users each day.
-Blog readership has grown by over 66% in the last year.
-According to ELearning Magazine “Approximately 47% of enterprises are reportedly planning to use social networks for employee, customer and channel communications. What once was considered a productivity drain, has now moved to the mainstream of HR, Training, Sales and Service department operations. Organizations are realizing real business benefits from these new collaboration tools”.
The 3D application of Just Leap In allows you to connect to friends on Facebook. Second Life is looking to embrace social media within its platform. Are there drawbacks? Yes. Well, for one thing if one is training/ learning in a virtual world social media would not be the best device to focus on the content at hand. Most would much rather be updating their status on a social media application. “Here I sit writing a blog entry…” While collaboration should be encouraged is the integration of social networking within virtual worlds for training a must? And if so, how and to what extent?
