The Virtual Worlds Conference is quickly approaching. There are less than seven days left before we kick things off in New York next Thursday.

If you are coming, be sure to wrap up lunch early on Thursday and head to Room 2 at 1PM for my session on virtual world platforms. This session was a huge hit at the San Jose Virtual Worlds Conference last year with standing room only, so get there early. Here is an iCal/vCal event invite (right click and select save/open) as a reminder.

For Shootout 2.0, I’ll be breaking worlds and platform technologies down into a usable framework and will address considerations for collaboration, simulation, and marketing objectives. If you happen to be with a platform or virtual world company, it’s in your best interest to be there to keep me straight on the facts and help field questions from the audience.

There’s much to cover, so show up caffeinated.

“Sign up forms must die,” proclaims Luke Wroblewski in his new book Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks.

I couldn’t agree more.

There is an emerging trend among Web 2.0 sites to employ a gradual engagement model as a way to give users a taste, often times a complete activity or experience, before asking them to sign up.

Virtual worlds and MMOs are quite possibly the worst offenders when it comes to forcing users through a registration process. Guests are often relegated to look at sample screen shots and read descriptions of a world before deciding to hand over their personal information for a closer look.

By and large, enthusiasts have populated online worlds to date. Whether they are hardcore gamers or early adopters of virtual worlds, they don’t need convinced to try a new service and they don’t care how easy or hard it is to use.

The design paradigm must change if the industry is to be successful in attracting and retaining casual users. If you are publishing a casual social or game world this year, even in 2008 there is a chance it will be the first avatar-based, immersive experience for your users.

In some ways, the Free to Play model that many world designers are using is addressing the monetary investment piece of the puzzle, but most worlds are still requiring a sign-up process before putting users into the world.

As experience designers we need to move the sign-up process from the download/sign-up page to a series of interactions in the world. The percentage of casual prospective users that are lost between the web pages describing a virtual world and the sign-up form is non-trivial. Equally significant is the number of users lost between sign-up and entering the world.

If you are still not convinced, an excerpt of Wroblewski’s book has been posted over at A List Apart.

CCP and their online game EVE Online is a delightfully disruptive force in the MMO industry. It was no surprise when I saw this on the Kill Ten Rats blog:

CCP [the makers of EVE Online] just started accepting candidacies for the Council of Stellar Management, or as their news post was amusingly titled, the Council of Stellar Awesomeness…This is a player-elected council of nine members who represent the playerbase to CCP, and CCP in turn promises to “attempt to accomodate all reasonable requests by player Representatives” and to “do everything in its power to resolve the topics presented.” They’re taking it pretty seriously, too — each term of the council requires a face-to-face meeting at the CCP offices, with travel (to Iceland!), lodging, and food paid for by CCP.

Incorporating user/player/resident feedback is an interesting phenomenon for MMO publishers. It is a hybrid of community management, governance and user-generated content.

This move by CCP is not the first time a sandbox MMO has attempted to give their high profile users a formal outlet to provide input and influence the publisher.

Second Life Views was a program started by Linden Lab and described as “a series of bi-monthly meetings with SL Residents to discuss the design and implementation of new features for SL.” To the best of my knowledge, the Views group has not met in quite a while. More recently, I noticed a Governance Team lead by Linden lab holding in-world office hours for residents to stop by to ask questions and discuss topics.

What makes the EVE Council different than other attempts like SL Views is the fact that players will be responsible to fellow players, not just advising the publisher of the MMO.

A major drawback of programs like SL Views and Town Hall forums is that users are likely to overwhelm the publisher and their ability to properly manage the input. After all, well managed MMO publishers have far fewer employees than they have users, right?

If you want to see more details about the Council of Stellar Management (CSM), you can download a brief on it here. I’m excited to see this in action in the coming months!

I am calling for an end to classifying online games, virtual worlds, and social networks as being either wholly asynchronous or synchronous social mediums. Not only are these the wrong terms for what we really mean, they are treacherous generalizations. It also helps perpetuate the delusion that these are entirely separate industries, which I’ll dive into with a separate ranting blog post another day.

Asynchronous and synchronous terms began with technologists describing technology behind data communication. At some point we made the mistake in assuming this is a critical point of differentiation in describing the social interactions that ride the technology.

The truth is that technology is eroding synchronous communication while asynchronous communication has become so efficient that we can use it synchronously.

Our offline lives are being invaded by what Howard Rheingold refers to as digital distractions. People that read and write email on their Blackberry in a restaurant while their date is sitting across from them is a commonplace phenomenon today. I would argue that the conversation with the date and the email dialogue are asynchronous.

Personal computers of today are inherently designed to be asynchronous, making them a powerhouse for multi-tasking. While virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft simulate real-time environments, users rely heavily on features like chat history, inventory “drop boxes” and in-world email messaging systems for their social interactions.

While synchronous and asynchronous may be a way to distinguish underlying technology or loosely refer to the nature of virtual environments, we need to move the design discussion away from this being an either/or design choice.

Online social experiences should be designed from the ground up, using the right interactions and subsequent technology that make the most sense and are the most enjoyable for the users.

The founders of Bitstrips.com are passionate about user-generated content and comic strips. This week they launched a do-it-yourself comic strip service that garnered much deserved attention on the trade show floor at SXSW Interactive.

Bitstrips.com is an example of user-generated content at it’s best. I mean, who doesn’t at some point in life wish they could illustrate comics or draw? Taking an aspirational skill and making it fun and social for the masses is a winning strategy as proven by the likes of Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

Users are able to customize an avatar for their account using the comic design tools and there are all the social networking tools we come to expect like friends, comments, ratings, etc. They put in some cool peer production features like shareable characters and the option to allow other users to edit your strips.

It didn’t take long for users to discover the peer production functionality. BA from Bitstrips created a Mark Zuckerberg character for this hilarious strip which was then used by Wired in their Twitter mash-up comic (featuring a snarky tweet by yours truly).

As with many user-generated content services, Bitstrips content rights are still evolving. Their current Terms of Service provides that users retain the rights to content they post (such as character dialog) but only grants a revocable license for non-commercial use of content created using the Bitstrips tools. During SXSW they told me they were talking to Creative Commons about a more robust licensing structure.

The “What Teens Want Online” panel consisted of one adult and a half dozen teens talking about their online and mobile habits.

The panel started out with the young panelists listing the websites they like to use and why. The common theme was personal interests (finding music), personal expression (profiles), and news (gaming, music).

“I don’t really use that avatar stuff,” said one teen panelist.

The panel reinforced a trend I’ve seen elsewhere that teens are not a rich demographic for virtual worlds.

Runescape and GAIA were the only specific virtual worlds/MMOs liked by the panelists, but it was clear they don’t use them much. Zwinky was mentioned by two panelists as being dull. Pay to play was a common objection to other worlds and games.

It was clear that the teens do not use social software for broadening their network of friends. While MySpace and FaceBook were ubitquitous, specialized social networks like Last.fm, iLike.com, Flickr, Twitter and Photobucket are not popular. When I asked a few of the panelists afterwards about these sites, only a few knew of Photobucket and made limited use of it.

On the mobile front, there was consensus that instant messaging has been replaced with unlimited SMS messaging. Aside from SMS, panelists use their phones for wallpapers, ringtones, games and photo sharing.