Mini Friday and Mobile Virtual Worlds
Tens of millions of people use virtual worlds on PCs. World of Warcraft, Habbo, Second Life,
Club Penguin and other virtual worlds have made them mainstream online entertainment. And it
doesn't stop there. Some analysts and experts believe virtual worlds to be the next major phase in
the development of the Web.
Gartner predicted in April: “By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet
users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a ‘second life’, but not necessarily in Second Life.”
On the other hand, another future prediction is the rise of mobile Internet. Internet use is
currently being detached from the PC environment and expanded to various mobile devices.
In the crossroads of these trends is a vast uncharted territory: virtual worlds on mobile
devices. And I have a tickling feeling that we'll see something interesting development in this
field soon :)
We at Sulake started thinking, designing and prototyping mobile
Habbo Hotel already some years ago. In 2004 we
developed two mobile Habbo prototypes, but the time wasn't right for a commercial product. It
worked only on high-end phones that teens didn't have and data traffic costs for users were just
too high.
Later in 2006 we decided to setup a small research project around mobile virtual worlds. In
order to understand their desirability and nature in real-world use, we launched a project called
Mini Friday. It's a simple mobile virtual world – at this stage meant for adults – and it can be
downloaded and used by anyone for free at
minifriday.com. It works on most Nokia
Series 60 phones.
Mini Friday was launched on December 21, 2006. We haven't promoted it actively at all; users
have found it based on word of mouth mostly. And now we have over 155,000 registered users who come
mostly from surprising places: the top three countries are Indonesia, Brunei and Russia!
Mini Friday is a
straight port of core Habbo functionality to mobile phones in order to see the differences in usage
between PC-based and mobile virtual worlds. For now, we have just worked around the weaknesses of
mobile phones: small screen, text typing limitations and limited processing power. However, the
prototype is not yet using any of the strengths of mobile devices, such as constant connectivity,
real and virtual world connections, media creation and sharing, local networking, messaging,
contacts integration, standby and screensaver screen integration, etc.
By experimenting with the above possibilities we'll see new types of virtual worlds in the
future. One existing example is
MoiPal made by
Ironstar Helsinki, which is a
combination of a virtual world and a tamagotchi. I also believe virtual worlds and social
networking can blend quite naturally on mobile phones. People are already using voice for real-time
and SMS text messaging for asynchronous communication. Both could be augmented by virtual worlds
and profile-based communication respectively.
In practice, the huge selection of different handset models with different technologies makes
it difficult to launch a service that could be reached by everyone. And the strengths of mobile
phones can't really be used on older Java phones. But on selected platforms it is possible to
innovate fresh concepts and user experiences, and build completely new worlds :)
