It has been a crazy exhilarating week with the launch of Metanomics and it was wonderful to see the venue and the Web site live, and so first, a big thank you to everyone.

I’ll post about this at more length, but taking on Metanomics has been yet another personal eye-opener facilitated by virtual worlds. I’ve said this in other ways or at other times, but I believe that if you want to understand how social and immersive media are going to upend the way we think about collaborating, the nature of the enterprise, the challenges and opportunities around identity and privacy, or how we share and create – then hop into a virtual world where the users generate the content and take the future for a spin.

Beyers and M Set the Stage

Metanomics is what it is because of the community. But why should any broadcast, or class room, or product be any different? The result of this is a requirement for authenticity and engagement. How organizations accomplish this will define, I think, whether they survive. Now, I don’t claim that we’ve completely accomplished this with Metanomics – thankfully, our community believes in virtual worlds, and believes in what Robert Bloomfield built, and we were lucky enough to work with Keystone (Jon Brouchoud) who, I think, WAS able to capture the authentic spirit of Metanomics in the build.

As time goes on, I feel an incredible sense of responsibility to maintain that authenticity and engagement – and hope that the community will continue to build Metanomics with us…it is more theirs than ours, and hopefully the shared goal of increasing our understanding and broadening the use of virtual worlds for serious uses will carry us forward.

M Linden
We were lucky enough to launch the “new” Metanomics with Mark Kingdon of Linden Lab. You can view the full interview here.

With hundreds of audience questions, an hour was barely sufficient to cover all the bases so we posted them on the Metanomics Web site, and it was amazing to see M respond. Among the highlights from his post show response:

“Developing economies are definitely a part of our future. In fact, our growth has been surging lately in developing markets around the world. The beauty of the Second Life experience and economy is that you can be anywhere in the world and participate if you have a computer and are connected to the grid…and many people do. Things like language support become more difficult in smaller markets although our next viewer release will feature a good number of additional languages thanks to the hard work of wonderful Residents around the world!”

On “a killer app”:

“We absolutely have to make it easier for musicians and other performers to perform meaningfully in Second Life. We’ve looked at the challenges extensively and have a good idea of what we need to do but we won’t be able to get to it in 2009. We see live performance as a “killer app” in Second Life.”

Second Life 2.0:

“The Second Life 2.0 overhaul is well-underway. You’ll see the first major elements towards the end of the year and early next year. The work—as you can imagine—is very complex because any experience change touches the web, the viewer, the simulators, the databases and our infrastructure. When will it be complete? Well, sometime before my hair goes completely gray. Joking aside, its an 18 month process for the major elements.

Profiles on the web are coming. Our second busiest page on our website is the place where you can find your friends online. I could build an empire around that alone! So, yes, social tools are coming.

Glad to hear SLim is very useful. Stay tuned for some upcoming voice announcements. It is a big part of our future product strategy. Did you know we serve about a billion minutes of voice a month? That’s a big number in VOIP.”

On gambling (maybe, but not a focus), and no Teen Grid merger for now:

“Age verification is not the current barrier to gambling. There are other things we’d have to work through around general access in specific geographies. Right now, we’re focused on renovating our core offering.

There are no plans to merge the Teen and main grid at this time. Philip and I dream of a single grid and wax poetically when asked but frankly it’s not on the roadmap now.”

Thanks to M for answering the follow-up questions. It’s really refreshing to see the level at which the Lab is engaging with the community, both on the Second Life blog and elsewhere.

Metanomics and the Feds:
The next episode of Metanomics takes place this Wednesday the 13th at 1:00 p.m. PST/SLT.

Financial Interest and Social Security: Government Takes a Serious Look at Virtual Worlds
How is government using virtual worlds? What platforms are emerging as standards? How are security concerns being addressed? Are proprietary or open source solutions the preferred approach?

Federal agencies are increasingly looking to virtual world technologies as both an opportunity and a potential threat. On this episode of Metanomics, we are joined by Dr. Paulette Robinson and Dr. Robert Young, leading figures in the adoption of the metaverse at all levels of government.