I have talked recently to quite a few makers of virtual worlds and most of them don’t have the topic “data portability” really on their agenda, yet. A few of them even see it as a big threat to their business model. But let me explain, why they should care about data portability from the very beginning.

Who are their competitors?

First of all - who are the biggest competitors of virtual worlds in general? I would say every single social media application is in the end a kind of competitor - especially social networks like MySpace or Facebook. Why? We all know that people spend more and more time online and that the biggest loser above all is television. But also the increasing online time is limited.

Kids, teens, young adults and adults spent more and more time an platforms on which they connect with their friends/co-workers/business partner, communicate and interact with each other, already do things together (even if that is apart from virtual worlds not so common yet), share stuff, are creative and so on.

And what offer virtual worlds? When we talk about that on this abstract level you can say, that they offer the exact same thing. To make it clear: it’s again about making friends, about communicating, interacting, doing things together, being creative and so on.

People have just a limited set of time, which they can spend online for their social activities and all those platforms are in a competition to get the attention of these internet users.

I would assume, that quite many virtual world makers haven’t accepted this equivalence yet - because they “are doing something different” in their eyes - and therefore also don’t observe and assess the ongoing change on the web platforms side, which in my eyes is accelerating significantly right now.

What are the requirements?

If virtual worlds would observe the web much better, they would have the following topics on their agenda, which are driving this change, right now:

1. Taking my social network with me

Quite a lot of social media application already offer me, to ‘take my social network with me’. It’s not yet really based on a standards, but several workarounds are already there. I am talking of the typical Gmail, Facebook whatever exchange/adjustment you can make, if you sign up.

It will be a matter of course that if I use a social platform - and for now let us see virtual worlds also as a social platform - that I can see with the push of a button, who of my social network already uses this social platform and who not, will get at least an invite.

That is still missing - and especially at mirror worlds - who have this strict connection to the real-life should care much more about making use of existing social network informations.

2. Smooth data exchange between platforms

User don’t want to care anymore about all those platforms they use. They want to use the ones they like and rest should be done in the background. Therefore: If I add a friend on platform XYZ it will be implicitness, that I will be connected with him in general … and not only on this platform. People will stop thinking about that!

If I communicate with someone, I don’t want to care anymore, which platform/interface he is using! Look at ping.fm for example - even if that is still only one step on the way to the finish - I can communicate there with others without caring anymore, if these people use Facebook, MySpace, Twitter or whatever.

3. Conversations will be decentralized

Look what is happening at FriendFeed right now, even if it’s still a geeky tool: the way we talk about things is changing. And it’s also getting pretty close to a real-time conversation - as close as also Twitter already gets.

This whole “FriendFeed development” shows me is that people don’t really care anymore where they talk about interesting stuff. There is a bigger discussion going right now about the fragmentation of conversations and I would assume, that in the end it will bring us to the point, that we will talk about stuff, device, location, platform independently - we will get a decentralized conversation technology, to talk about items we share with others.

Virtual worlds have right now, no plan B for that. How can virtual worlds become part of such an decentralized conversation, which is advancing right now?

If virtual worlds platforms and technologies will not be an integrated part of this development, they will simply fail in attracting enough people, to use them on a regular basis. I am also surprised that we haven’t seen much stronger cooperations between social networks and virtual worlds yet, because to bring these two giants together, will be pretty important.

Why should they care about it now already?

Two answers: Because their CTOs will start crying if you tell them in about one year, that you have new requirements Your IT is concepting the architecture of these platforms right now and it would be a good idea to think about API’s and all the upcoming data portability standards right now, from the very beginning.

And of course - every platform wants to have as many users as possible. If you get closer with social networks, if you make it easier to use your virtual world as an extension, as an alternate interface to be active within my existing social online environment, than you will be much more successful in the near future.