This week Millions of us launched a new campaign: ‘Imagine Life Sweeter‘. I’ve lost track of how many of these similar campaigns where launched recently. Campaigns which asks residents to participate in the development of new services. Sometimes they can be as blunt as ‘if you can think of a concept that will make us a lot of money, we will give you 10 dollar’, or in more covert questions such as the one posed by Millions of Us and Oranges ‘Create‘ program.
I was never a big enthusiast of the ‘think of X for us and we will give you Y’ contests. It shows lack of creativity by whoever issues the contest. You (the company issuing the contest) are supposed to be the professionals, you should be able to create concepts, instead of creating these ‘no gain no loss’ contests, hoping for that one diamond amongst the rubble. But lately the application of these crowd mining contests seems to have grown exponentially. And it left me wondering when this ‘tapping into the wisdom of crowds’ becomes ‘crowd abuse’. Using the intelligence of many, practically cost free, to generate ideas that could potentially earn millions.
Now of course, crowd mining, gathering information from large crowds such as your customers, is not new - or related to Virtual worlds per definition. But there are an awful lot of companies that seem to want to get information from the users of Virtual Worlds because they simply don’t know anything about them. Now, there is nothing wrong with getting customer insights, but hoping one of the many responses offers some insights in developing some ground breaking, and potentially very valuably solution is not something I’d encourage anyone to get involved in from a consumer point of view.
In my predictions for 2008 I described this as ‘the search for the Holy Grail‘, companies trying to break the ’stasis quo’ of the Metaverse. Though there is no real ’stasis quo’ development-wise, the sign ups and attraction of Second Life seems to have calmed down a lot since about halfway trough 2007. It is pretty plain to see the killer app for Second Life or similar metaverses still has to be developed. Drawing in the crowds, and launching the platform to new heights, and whoever will ignite this growth stands to gain a lot of money from it.
Posted on: January 19, 2008 | Share on:
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Rheta Shan
said on January 20th
Ah well, there is no killer application for life. Second or First doesn’t make a difference :)
Rick van der Wal
said on January 20th
Perhaps the word killer app is a bit vague, I mean the one application of Virtual worlds that could give it a boost, that will reach out to the masses because of meaningful, useful application rather then Hype.
There will be applications that will push more people into virtual worlds, stay tuned, for tomorrow I will post about one of those applications ;)
(Which at the same time makes a great case for the ‘Second or First doesn;t make a difference’ statement!)