Resident Recommendations for Second Life | MHCI Capstone Project 2008

To yield a more complete understanding of the existing competitive space, we conducted both exploratory research and competitive reviews.

Exploratory Research

The exploratory research involved assimilating key points from existing literature on virtual worlds, social networks, and Second Life.Some major findings were:

A service with great breadth but little depth causes users to feel his or her needs are unaddressed, but a service that attempts to fully address a particular group's needs becomes too specialized, isolating a majority of users.
A successful online community is supported by viable content, social interaction, and sustainable rewards for the user
Users need to establish trust with both other users and the service provider
Users need to be engaged in their online community.

These key findings were also reflected by findings from our user studies of Second Life Residents and social network users.

Competitive Reviews

The competitive reviews contained analysis of the features of several industry members, SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis, and the graphing of some of these industry players according to their focus and indended usage. These Review help set the tone for our user research. Some key findings from this analysis include:

Second Life already has many of the basic social networking features. This suggests that it is not the absence of these features that causes new Residents to leave Second Life, but their organization and accessibility.
Motivation is a key factor in the success of online communities. This can be accomplished by giving the user activities to perform and providing real life connections of friends and interests
It is possible for a service to blur the line between ego-centric and object-object centric, and between open-ended and goal-oriented. The question remains as to the optimal approach: is it best to embed social networking features, provide developer access to produce third party applications, or export your program as a plug-in to another?

This analysis allowed us to understand the range of different users these services target, and thus helped us define the participant pool for our user studies.