Rosedale: I've never seen Webkinz, but I bet it's like Club Penguin.
Industry Standard: I think it is.
Rosedale: It's very similar. Club Penguin has a big inventory of stuff kids can buy.
Industry Standard: Right. And despite the fact that it's limited, kids aren't really creating, although they do some interesting things on their own. It's proved to be a runaway success. And I've seen other virtual worlds like There.com, as an example, where it's very much simplified. At the other end of the spectrum, you have World of Warcraft, which has probably one of the most complicated UIs I've ever seen, yet it's also extremely popular.
Rosedale: Well, I think there are different experiments in different areas. If you look at There, it has less capability than Second Life and it has not quite proportionately, but it also has less users. It's less successful. There are things that There does that are unique and cool and they've gone after different verticals and stuff, and I'm not commenting on that. I'm just saying in the mainstream, it looks like a slightly less capable version -- not slightly, substantively so it's a good comparison -- less capable version of Second Life in terms of what kind of content you can build that is also substantially less interesting as looked at as both the mass scale of the adoption and the demographic. The demographic is tighter, narrower, less diverse. Our demographic is bigger and more adverse. So, that just looks like nothing new being gained there.
If you look at Webkinz and Club Penguin, what I think is happening there is a different problem, which is what I said about my son, which is the half life of use is short, but the number of prospective users is gigantic. And so it's like a wave that's gaining momentum and size and it's rolling its way all the way through. Every kid in the world will use Webkinz once. But, wait three months and see if your child is still totally sort of following along.
... The other thing, I think, which is something that I talk about a lot and think about a lot, is that I really do believe that once the usability problems and the initial experience problems are brought down, there's going to be an inversion of how we think about virtual worlds, where we realize that virtual worlds are potentially easier to do things in, especially for people that have less - I'm not going to say "education," but are less Web educated, that have less text...
Industry Standard: Less Web savvy.
Rosedale: Yeah, less Web savvy. I think that the less Web savvy people, which are still the great majority of people on planet Earth, will actually go to virtual worlds first, because they're simpler.
Industry Standard: Really?
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