Webkinz World highlighted in the New York Times

Webkinz World received a nice boost from the New York Times this morning, in a front-section report by Brooks Barnes entitled Web Playgrounds of the Very Young. A couple of other blogs have picked up on the article, including Terra Nova.

However, it seems that Barnes wrote this article several weeks ago, or didn't do enough research, because there is no mention of the Christmas server shutdown or continuing room access problems in the virtual world. Rather, the article gives an overview of virtual worlds aimed at children, and the business models that drive them.

Still, there was one bit of information that I found particularly interesting -- the size of the Webkinz World customer base:

Worlds like Webkinz, where children care for stuffed animals that come to life, have become some of the Web's fastest-growing businesses. More than six million unique visitors logged on to Webkinz in November, up 342 percent from November 2006, according to ComScore Media Metrix, a research firm.

Let's make a few creative guesstimates here. First, let's assume that two million new unique customers were added between November and today, thanks to the holiday shopping season. Second, let's assume that the world lost a half-million existing customers, kids who outgrew the world or graduated to a new video game system or game. That makes 7.5 million uniques for December. That's a big number -- comparable not only to other kids-oriented worlds like Habbo Hotel (estimated to have around 8 million active monthly users in May) but also some of the largest gaming virtual worlds (like World of Warcraft, which has more than nine million subscribers) and well above the number of active users in the largest adult social virtual world, Second Life, which apparently has plateaued at around 550,000 active users.

In other words, Webkinz World is not just a fringe toy concept. It's a big deal to a lot of people.

It also means Ganz has a lot of customers to keep happy -- not just millions of kids who own the pets and want to maintain them virtually, but also their parents who want to keep their kids happy. So far this holiday season, Ganz has been doing a terrible job, not just by allowing its toy sales and customer growth to outstrip the ability of its technical infrastructure to scale, but also by keeping its customers in the dark about what's going on.

Let's hope things improve in the new year.

Generation G

On The Digital Media Machine blog, I recently discussed Generation G -- the under-40s who belong to the video game generation. According to my definition,

... Most people in this demographic grew up with games, and many of them still play now. They are familiar with gaming conventions relating to movement, exploration, cooperation, competition, and communication. Additionally, interaction with video games from an early age has created a foundation of familiarity and interest in computing technologies.

While I noted that more than 80 million people in the United States belong to this demographic, I did not get into the international dimension. U.S. Census Bureau data says there were nearly 4.5 billion people under the age of 40 as of mid-2007. Obviously, many of those in developing countries may never have seen a video game console or touched a computer, but in other countries parts of Europe and Asia, video games, computers, and the Internet are a way of life for people in this age group.

The ESWN blog found a report that supports the Generation G hypothesis in Taiwan. The United Daily News (lian he bao, 聯合報) reported the results of a telephone survey of 15,007 people from all over Taiwan that polled them on their 'Net habits, and broke down the results by age. The inset graphic is from the United Daily News website, and shows the data. Not surprisingly, almost 100% of the youngest bracket (aged 12 to 20) were Internet users. Most of the 21-30 and 31-40 groups were also online. But there was a steep dropoff from the 30-somethings to the 40-somethings, and just over one in five of the over-50s were online:

Age 12-20: 99.8%
Age 21-30: 94.4%
Age 31-40: 84.2%
Age 41-50: 58.6%
Age 51+: 21.9%

The survey also asked about blogging, and I was quite surprised to see how active Taiwan's teenagers were in this respect: Nearly half of the 12-20 year olds said they blog, and about 30% of 20-somethings do the same. 30-somethings in Taiwan are far less likely to blog, with just 12.5% saying that they maintain one. This matches with my own experience -- most of my Taiwanese friends are in their 30s and 40s, and I only know one who has a blog.

Webkinz World room problem continues

Update to the Webkinz World logon situation: While parent company Ganz has reactivated the virtual world's logon servers, at least some users are still unable to get to their rooms. We updated to Flash 9 (as recommended by the site) on December 28, but this did not make the site perform any better than it had on December 23, when we first observed problems getting into our daughter's dog's room.

I have also tried multiple browsers on two different computers (a five-year-old iMac running Tiger, and a brand-new T61 ThinkPad running XP) but the same thing happens: We click "My Room" and the Flash animation stalls on "loading furniture" (see inset image). Is this what everyone else is seeing?

People are definitely getting upset about this. I received lots of traffic from Google since my last post on Webkinz World, and the search terms are mostly related to site loading problems. Four people left comments, including this angry message from "Spitting Angry Kitty":

It seems pretty rotten of the Ganz company to sell overpriced stuffed toys (not to mention the charms, body sprays and trading cards!) with the WebKinz world tie-in as the big selling point, and then NOT have sufficient server capacity to make it a fun, non-frustrating experience for all its old and new customers. It's sure soured me on future WebKinz purchases for my daughter, and I'm definitely more tempted to check out some of the new competitive sites. Shame on you WebKinz!

While there are other virtual worlds aimed at young people (such as Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin) I don't think there are any that have such an extensive real-world toy tie-in. That just adds to the frustration -- lots of people bought Webkinz animals and trinkets as Christmas gifts for children, and now the kids are unable to fully enjoy them. The terrible customer support on the Webkinz site, which is compounded by nonexistent or inaccurate messages about site outages (as noted by this commenter) has compounded the fury.

If this were a MMORPG or adult-oriented social virtual world, I would categorize it as a textbook lesson on poor customer support and P.R. practices. But companies like Blizzard and Linden Lab have really learned a lot about support in the past few years, and understand the importance of keeping customers informed when World of Warcraft or Second Life goes offline. Ganz, it appears, still doesn't get it.

Shut out of Webkinz World

My daughter has been an enthusiastic Webkinz World inhabitant for about three weeks. She received a Webkinz dog at a party, and after entering the dog's code into the website, proceeded to explore the site, set up the dog's identity and room, played some of the casual games, and -- to my alarm -- figured out very quickly how to shop for virtual clothes and other accessories.

Just before Christmas, however, Webkinz World began experiencing problems. She could log onto the site, but couldn't get into her room. This impacted her shopping and care-related activities ("feeding" the pet, petting him, etc.) but she was at least able to continue playing the games.

For Christmas she received some real-world Webkinz goods, and entered the codes into the site for virtual world equivalents or alternatives (for instance, entering the code for a Webkinz mousepad granted her a virtual framed print) but was still frustrated by being shut out of the room. I tried searching the support pages and switching browsers, but there was no help there. I assumed that the rush of Christmas-related Webkinz purchases had slowed down the site.

Then, today there was an even bigger problem. She couldn't log on at all, and was presented with the messages shown in the inset image. She seemed to take it in stride, but I can imagine there is probably a core group of Webkinz users who are driven frantic by the loss of access to their virtual pet.

I've seen this before in other virtual worlds and online communities that aren't able to scale during peak periods, or to handle a sudden inrush of new users. For instance, regular visitors to Second Life are accustomed to outages caused by too many people entering the same virtual space at once, or the inability to logon during peak times (see my earlier blog entry about this entitled Second Life's temporary population ceiling). However, at least Linden Lab (Second Life's parent company) is relatively open about technical issues and usage data, and has a pretty deep support section on the Second Life website. Webkinz World's support pages are nearly useless -- they're written for children who need to get started with the site, and avoid specifics relating to the nature of site problems or troubleshooting advice.

In summary, I think Webkinz World is a great concept, but the scaling and support issues definitely need work.

Keeping up with new technologies

I've been reading Mitchell Stephens' Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) for my last class at the Harvard Extension School, and came upon this quote on page 169:

Writing about the digital world today is as perilous as writing about the cinematic world must have seemed a century ago. It is difficult to keep up. New terms, techniques and devices seem to take possession of the cognoscenti every couple of years.

Every couple of years? How about every couple of days! Some of the sites and tools that I reference on this website and my computerworld.com blog didn't even exist a year or two ago, and I am constantly asked about new, previously unheard-of services that have some special feature or niche audience. It's impossible to keep up with all of them, let alone to keep track of the ones that I already know about. For instance, I found out this morning that News At Seven -- an automated news-gathering application that I first checked out last year -- dropped the Half Life game engine and went into public beta nearly two months ago. There is no way of knowing about these developments unless I use the applications on a regular basis, or hear about them from some other source, like a blog or a MSM outlet.

To be fair, Stephens wrote this 10 years ago, when the creative tools behind consumer technology and media was mostly controlled by deep-pocketed companies and skilled programmers. So much has changed since then. The cost of building applications and websites has dropped a great deal, there are hundreds of millions of new users with broadband connections, and there are lots of inexpensive or free tools that audience members can use on their own to create content or build their own sites and services.

And while Stephens did not anticipate tools and technologies such as Blogger, virtual worlds, machinima, Facebook, or the rise of open-source software, he did foresee user-generated video:

Producing video is no longer going to be a skill mastered only on the job. It should become an art form kids learn at about the age they learn how to draw a face, play the guitar or navigate the Internet. Video should no longer be the private tool of professionals in the employ of advertising agencies and media conglomerates or of well funded artists. Teenagers should be playing with it; friends should be staying in touch on it; radicals may challenge the status quo through it; academics should eventually be warned to produce it or perish. Video will be shot by amateurs and freelancers; it will be edited in basements, in garrets.

Ray Kurzweil on virtual reality, augmented reality, and Second Life

Recently in Computerworld, I had a very interesting interview with Ray Kurzweil on some of the issues he discussed in The Singularity Is Near. Portions of the interview appeared in the print issue (see The Grill: Ray Kurzweil talks about 'augmented reality' and the Singularity), but I also made sure to publish the other portions of the interview on my Computerworld blog:

• The Kurzweil interview, continued: Portable computing, virtual reality, immortality, and strong vs. narrow AI
• The Kurzweil interview: More comments on the "exponential growth" of computational power

Kurzweil had a few things to say about virtual reality and related technologies. I am republishing those excerpts here, as they really relate to the focus of my personal blog.

On the evolution of hardware technologies and "augmented reality":

... We're going to solve this dilemma we have now with displays. On the one hand, people like 50-inch screens, and they'll spend thousands of dollars on them. On the other hand, they like watching movies on a 1- or 2-inch screen, but that's really not a satisfactory experience. We are going to solve that by putting the displays in our glasses, which will beam images to our retinas. This will create very high-resolution virtual displays that can hover in the air. And it can also completely overtake your visual field of view in three dimensions, creating full-immersion visual/auditory virtual reality.

We'll also have augmented real reality. The computers will be watching what you watch, listening to what you're saying, and they'll be helping. So if you look at someone, little pop-ups will appear in your field of view, reminding you of who that is, giving you information about them, reminding you that it's their birthday next Tuesday. If you look at buildings, it will give you information, it will help you walk around. If it hears you stumbling over some information that you can't quite think of, it will just pop up without you having to ask."

On the exponential advances in technology:

... So ultimately, everything is going to be transformed by information technology. We're moving toward tabletop devices that can actually create three-dimensional objects. Right now you can take an information file, and turn that into a movie, or a book, or a sound recording, and those things used to be physical products, and now are just information.

Well, the same thing will be true of what we now think of as physical products. We'll be able to have an information file, and be able to turn it into any three-dimensional object that you need, such as a module for a house, a solar panel, a toaster, or even the toast, or a blouse, by basically reorganizing matter and energy from very basic input materials, which will be recycled, to create physical products, and there are a number of roadmaps to get there, and I believe we'll see those kinds devices within 20 years.

A general observation about virtual reality:

... We'll be spending quite a bit of our time in virtual-reality environments. Environments like Second Life are really a crude harbinger of what is to come. We'll have these virtual-reality environments which will be quite competitive with real reality. They'll be very realistic. They'll be full immersion, just as in SL you can be someone else, you don't have to look the same in these virtual environments.

And they won't just be kind of a plaything. Second Life already has a real economy, and people do real business transactions and have real romance. And we'll be doing that in a real panoply of virtual-reality environments.

I first read The Singularity Is Near earlier this year. It ties in with a lot of things I've been discussing on this blog and elsewhere, in terms of the evolution of mass media in the next few decades.

On a related note, I'm going to carry out a qualitative analysis of Singularity and some of Marshall McLuhan's writings in my final paper for this semester's class at Harvard ... I'll be sure to post some of the analysis here after the course ends in January.

Tomorrow is Immersive Education Day @ Harvard

I wanted to remind Boston-area readers that tomorrow is Immersive Education Day @ Harvard University. This is a public event, discussing emerging educational technologies and practices based on virtual reality. There will be a series of presentations by experts and practitioners, and a Q&A session as well.

The event takes place from 2 pm to 5 pm at Askwith Lecture Hall in Longfellow Hall, very close to Harvard Square. It's at 13 Appian Way, which is off of Brattle St. I've included a map of the location below:


View Larger Map

Immersive Education Day at Harvard

There's an interesting activity taking place next Saturday afternoon (Dec. 8, 2007) at Harvard: A series of presentations and a panel discussion about Immersive Education, organized through the Harvard Interactive Media Group. Here's an overview of the event:

Join the Harvard Interactive Media Group and the Grid Institute for a free half-day event to explore and discuss Immersive Education--the use of interactive 3d graphics, commercial game and simulation technology, virtual reality and other cutting-edge digital media tools to invigorate and enhance teaching practice. Educators, researchers and administrators from Harvard University, Boston College, MIT Media Lab, Amherst College and the United States Department of Education will give a series of presentations and demonstrations to provide attendees with an overview of Immersive Education and how virtual world and game-based learning technologies are used in and out of the classroom today.

... And here's a list of the speakers and the titles of their presentations:

"Enabling the Age of Immersive Education"
Aaron E. Walsh, Director, Immersive Education Initiative
Faculty, Boston College

"Fostering Civic Engagement through Immersive Education"
Gene Koo, Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
co-Director, Hub2 Project

"School 2.0 and Immersive Education"
Timothy J. Magner, Director, U.S. Department of Education
Advisor, Immersive Education Initiative

"The Restaurant Game: New forms of Artificial Intelligence for Immersive Education"
Jeff Orkin, Research Assistant, MIT Media Lab
co-Chair, Immersive Education Initiative

"Pedagogy, Assessment, and Learning Outcomes for Immersive Education"
John Carfora, Director of Sponsored Research, Amherst University
co-Chair, Immersive Education Initiative

I found out about the activity through my affiliation with the HIMG, but I already know most of the scheduled speakers, including Aaron -- check out our Terra Nova conversation from May, in which he outlines some of his ideas on education in virtual worlds. Jeff's "Restaurant Game" is also fascinating -- I saw a demo at a virtual worlds conference at MIT earlier this year, and it shows some interesting applications of game-related programming in AI and virtual worlds research.