Over the last few weeks, I’ve been asking researchers and industry experts, “What is the ideal number of avatars collaborating in a space?”

I thought I would share the initial feedback and pose the question to all of you here while I continue to research.

When virtual spaces are used for performing tasks in collaborative settings, there seems to be a consensus among the people I’ve talked to that effectiveness begins to decline in groups larger than 9 avatars.

This theory is reinforced by non-virtual world related research on group problem solving by the likes of Joseph E. McGrath and others.

I really like where Christopher Allen is headed with his posts on Dunbar’s Number, a theoretical limit to the number of active social relationships one can maintain. He and some of his commenters allude to the same group size of 7-9. I hear that Christopher recently gave an excellent presentation which expanded on some of this research and hope he will blog it soon.

There are also technology-based sweet spots that vary depending on the platform and application. Some popular 2D Flash worlds often appear crowded when more than a dozen avatars are in a space. This of course varies depending on avatar size relative to the space.

Graphically intensive 3D worlds get the benefit of an expanded area for representing avatars but also can sometimes suffer from lag caused by the intense stream of 3D data being synchronized between users’ computers.

What do you think? I am very interested in gathering some research on this and would love to hear from you!

See you all in LA next week

When given the option to download the latest Radiohead album for free directly from Radiohead’s promotional website, 2.3 million people opted to download it through BitTorrent.

This factoid comes from research just released by Big Champagne and MCPS-PRS. I picked up on the news here.

The research goes on to explain that venue familiarity was a key determining factor for those downloading the album. People find things through channels they are familiar with on the Internet, and for 2.9 million people, P2P networks happen to be what they know instead of the URL of the Radiohead website.

So how does venue familiarity apply to virtual worlds?

A major reason why branded web-based virtual worlds have gotten traction in the past few years is venue familiarity. Disney’s Club Penguin may not be a household name today if it had not been distributing its games on Miniclip, a site that is known by youth as a top destination for casual games.

It goes without saying that the web offers the largest number of “familiar venues” of online users. When you combine these familiar venues with a virtual world experience built with a portable and embeddable technology like Flash, the result is a very cost effective way for publishers to maximize their exposure and reach, not to mention integration with their existing content.