I’ve pinned myself down. I’m stuck in a corner. And I’m trying, frankly, to find a way to blog my way out of it.
Maybe this is the reaction we’re SUPPOSED to be having now that Second Life is over and we’re on to Second Life Social, or Second Life 2.0 (which makes it feel like it’s merely trying to catch up to the rest of the Web), or Second Life the Operating System.
I’m in one of those “on the one hand, but on the other” moments and it feels a little like one of those ethical exercises they made us think about in university: “do you kill the baby to save your family or do you kill the monkey to save the world”….my professor was a famous animal rights activist, you see, and he didn’t like to make it easy for us.
When the viewer came out I had one of those moments of delight that I remembered from the early days of Second Life: it was shiny, slightly clunky in places, but it was new and somewhere past the “ohhhh” moment were a bunch of “ah-ha’s”.
I still remember those early a-has: someone explaining to me about prim hair, rezzing my first box, and going dancing.
I didn’t understand the concept of dancing because no one really SAID very much – I didn’t realize most people were IMing or checking their e-mail or whatever they were doing, but what I DO remember is that I felt like I was learning a whole new culture and my guides to that culture weren’t really found in any of the books or the forums, they were found because other Residents actually CARED, and shared, and showed you around a little, or at least the ones I ran into did. By most accounts that’s the way that MOST people learned their way around and why they stayed.
I remember discovering that not ALL the sims looked like Mainland, that there were beautiful builds out there as well, sims like Svarga, which I stumbled across one day and thought was a stunning place to just, well, hang out, although I never realized it was supposed to be an ecosystem or whatever, I just thought it was really beautiful and told a story.
But it was also on Svarga where I was griefed for the first (and only) time: someone managed to put me in some sort of box or something which I couldn’t get out of and I panicked…I eventually realized I could teleport out but I felt a sense of shock and violation.
After, I couldn’t figure out why I was responding so emotionally to something that was “just a game” until I realized that I didn’t TREAT it as a game, it was a world, and I had a place in it, and while I could always log my avatar out I was too heavily invested in the sense of ‘being there’.
And I’ve had a similar sense with the new viewer, and Linden Homes, and seeing the new ad campaign they’re planning to run, and the ability to log in to a prim and Tweet or whatever: it’s not that I didn’t WANT all these things or that I didn’t advocate for them, but I’ve also been blogging long enough about the stuff I DON’T want to lose that I feel like I’m making a choice between monkey and child, between world and family.
Design Thinking and the Architecture
I’m a big believer in the rough concept of design thinking: that to effectively CHANGE something you need to look big, and broad, and you need to artfully combine data and engineering and linear thinking with art, intuition and holistic viewpoints.
A building doesn’t stand up without engineering. And a building is just a box if someone hasn’t designed the reason for it to be there in the first place. Finding the balance between design and engineering without it becoming either an exercise in vanity or one of ‘efficiency at all costs’ is the great challenge of our times: in Google’s search for engineering efficiency, it’s less EFFICIENT not to have a delete button, and it doesn’t make SENSE that you wouldn’t want to share all your friend’s data with others, the algorithm is all. And lord knows there are enough examples of design vanity in which form trumps functionality.
The biggest challenges, to my mind, of design thinking is that you need to be really, really, really good at it or you end up with a hodge podge in which both the engineering and the form are diluted; or, more critically, you choose the wrong FIELD OF VISION from which to tackle whatever problem you’re trying to solve.
Think of it this way: Gehry goes to design the Guggenheim but all he looks at is the lot on which the museum will be placed and forgets that there’s a whole city that the building needs to respond to and react to. In his solution, he looks broadly enough to realize that his museum can not just REFLECT the city around it but also transform it.
If you ask the right question at the right domain and you match an answer that is sound technically, that matches the unexpressed needs and expectations of the audience, and which, at its heart, is ELEGANT then you might have a winner.
But that’s a lot of “ifs” – and it’s also why there are so few companies that can do it successfully: the IDEOs or Frog Designs or Apples of the world. You might be better off sticking to JUST design or JUST engineering if you can’t pull it off.
The Wisdom of Crowds
Now, there’s an alternative, and the alternative is crowd sourcing and open source. And as much as people might think I’m some kind of fierce opponent to either of those (based on some of the comments in the roving crowd that is Twitter) I’m not: both are solutions to design challenges, and like all design challenges there is an appropriate tool for every problem.
There IS a wisdom of crowds, especially when it comes to answering engineering problems with very specific requirements, just as there are times in my office when everyone can pitch in on a problem and there are times when it’s better to leave the Web page design to a DESIGNER, or the strategy document to a strategist.
The challenge with the wisdom of crowds is when you’re still in the heuristics phase of answering a question – you haven’t quite modeled or hypothesized an answer to the question yet, so there’s no point in bringing the crowd in to build out a solution – you haven’t even arrived at one yet.
This, frankly, is why I feel that OpenSim is a disappointment. With OpenSim the question was how to create a virtual world engine (yeah, yeah, the Apache of virtual worlds) that would, pretty much, act like Second Life and be a reverse engineer from the viewer, only with more flexible server configuration so that the administrators could pull “modules” in and out at will. The design thinking behind OpenSim was primarily one of engineering, which isn’t WRONG, it’s laudable – and yet the answer isn’t a world changer because no one stopped to ask whether the heuristic itself needed a rework.
The other challenge with open source and crowd sourcing is that the economics of it can be murky, at best, opaque at worst, and we’re now seeing all kinds of corporations jumping on the band wagon because they’ve come to see it for what it is: cheap or free labor where it’s the promise of future returns that bears more weight than what you’re getting paid NOW.
All of which is to say that I have nothing again the fact that the Lab applied design thinking to the larger question of how to make Second Life more accessible, larger, more successful and more useful: the viewer is just one part of their solution, and you couldn’t crowd source this kind of design challenge.
I mean – I tried, as Tom Hale generously pointed out, through the viewer competition I held. And while the results were inspiring and had lots of great ideas, they weren’t able to deal with the larger holistic challenge that a viewer is just a viewer and you need a whole set of interlinking pieces if it’s going to fit into a broader attempt to make the world a better place.
Cultural Governance
My point about the development of all of this “Second Life 2.0″ stuff isn’t that design thinking doesn’t work or isn’t needed, but that there’s no sense that it’s coupled with a sense that governance is about both POLICY and CULTURE.
Tom Hale responded to my post yesterday by saying:
“Lots of residents (both inside and outside the lab) were involved in the viewer redesign. We drew inspiration from results of the viewer redesign contest (see http://dusanwriter.com/?p=557), from research and user feedback studies, from SLViews sessions, from usability tests (both in paper and in software) and from a private beta program. What we didn’t do, was make a small step forward, then try to get every Residents’ feedback.”
But this just leaves us where we started: that none of the Lindens have responded to my question as to whether the CULTURAL implications of the viewer were part of the discussion. And T didn’t jump on the following point in order to gently correct me either, when I said that:
To Linden Lab, while Second Life may be a world, it is not a culture. The more important culture in which Second Life participates is the broader one which encompasses our lives on-line. While there may be sub-cultures that find a place IN Second Life, the frontier days are over, and the sense of it still being “one world” no longer apply.
And maybe it’s asking too much of them and maybe it’s M who should respond – or, well SOMEONE should respond. I really do believe they discussed these things. I really do believe they asked the questions: “but how will the current Residents respond?”
But what I believe is that the reference point wasn’t the Second Life culture but rather the wider Web. The reference point wasn’t “what should we preserve that, if we did it right, would make the WEB ITSELF a better place” but rather “what should we incorporate from the wider Web to make ITS culture more accepting of Second Life.”
All I’d like is for someone to tell me that I’m wrong about this, and in what specific tangible ways.
Myself, Slipping Away
Now we hear that there are a bunch of people at the Lab trying to sort out how to handle anonymity, er, identity. And however they’re doing that, I’m sure they’ll come back with the same claim: you can’t design identity systems by committee, Residents were consulted (we read the forums!), and there were a few people brought in for consultations and feedback studies.
My sense, however, is that they started with a premise: in order to “play well with the Web” we need to find ways to link avatar identity to other systems. We GET that avatar identity on its own can be important, so we need to preserve the concept of choice. OK, so, let’s get cracking.
But do you see what I mean about field of vision? I mean, it seems to me that the premise should start with something like this:
“When we introduced commerce to Second Life, and c/m/t we changed the world. We created sustainability and we created a robust system of property and commerce which would need tending over time and would come under threat, but it’s still the REASON we’re here. And when we did that, we brought in some of the best thinkers of our time, and we thought about both the engineering challenge, the design challenge, but also the larger cultural implications. (Not to mention the business survival questions).
Now, with identity systems, we have another opportunity to redefine what the Web could REALLY be like. We’re at a unique pivot point here, and the decisions we make about identity could be the gold standard for the Web itself and our lives online. But to get it right, we need to view this challenge as a potential world-changer, and we need to think of this culturally….which means more than policy, which means more than adapting standards from elsewhere, which means remembering that there’s a REASON why avatar identity resonates, and we’d better be certain that we understand those reasons before we dilute the possibilities implicit in avatar identity or, well, we risk killing the child to save the family.”
See, I’m not talking here about some kind of challenge that’s OUTSIDE the concept of design thinking, or even engineering for that matter. Effectively solving problems means effectively understanding the landscape and assumptions of your target users: how they think and feel, what they hope for, and the larger landscape in which your solution will play out.
These are issues of governance. Apple deals with governance in its iPhone app store. Google tried (and failed) to deal with governance in its virtual world Lively. There.com tried to deal with governance in how it allowed content to enter its world and what age you needed to be to get in. Facebook tries to deal with governance by assuming that we all want to be transparent, and real, and linked, and scraped. Twitter is trying to deal with governance by letting me choose whether I want my geolocation to be made available through my tweets.
One of the defining characteristics of Second Life has been that its governance was based on a sort of utopian techno-libertarianism espoused by Philip Rosedale. And he may have had his, um, ways of expressing himself, but damn, I miss Philip some days.
I mean – is it too much to ask that the Lab open itself up a LITTLE bit for a broader, constructive and far-reaching conversation about identity? Or the profound implications of search in a 3D world? Or of how we’ll find stuff, and each other, in a world that’s SO large?
On Metanomics, Amanda mentioned that the Second Life “Search Team” now has employees from Yahoo, Google, eBay and Amazon. And while it’s great that they’re hiring new talent – I can’t help shuddering a little that the team now responsible for Second Life search includes people who come from companies where the ONLY purpose of search is to monetize it.
Baby and the Bath Water
Second Life is ready for business. It’s ready for a massive influx of new users. It’s ready to spread its wings and send out all kinds of messages and ads into the social media melting pot while we Tweet and post Flickr photos and do whatever else the Lab has planned to make sure the point is made that this is NOT the Second Life you once knew.
I believe that the Lab MAY be poised to become one of the new operating (eco)systems of our time.
Second Life could very easily become something akin to the iPhone – a platform and fully functioning design solution that allows for commerce, monetization, innovation, and applications coupled with a rigid, closed-off governance model in which assumptions have been made about who owns what, who gets access, who gets to make money off of it, and what it means to be “locatable”.
On the one hand, this is exciting to me. All of the reasons people once had to shoot me down when I was selling enterprise, brand, or consumer solutions based in Second Life are rapidly evaporating.
This is the future, I’ve come to believe, or at least it’s the future for NOW.
But the day I wake up and it really sinks in that my avatar has become a gadget is the day, I suppose, when I realize I didn’t do enough to make it not so.
I’m guessing you must have just finished Jaron Lanier’s new book.
“Second Life is ready for business. It’s ready for a massive influx of new users.”
No, it’s not. It’s barely ready for middle school, but perhaps there’s a productive member of society beneath the pimple faced tween after all.
Many of us desperately continue to hold out hope, but as my grandfather used to say “Wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up faster.”
Time will tell, but now is not the future.
I remember discovering that not ALL the sims looked like Mainland, that there were beautiful builds out there as well, sims like Svarga, which I stumbled across one day and thought was a stunning place
Um, not all the Mainland looks crappy in your caricature of it.
Svarga is no more, sunk by its owner’s indifference or leftist poverty. She refused to figure out ways to sell content, or sell the script with the sims, being an ardent technocommunist, and here we all are, no Svarga, and she is the poorer. So praising Svarga is not acceptable, it was a failed model.
Let me cut to the chase here with all this long thinky stuff on “wisdom of crowds” and “design by committee”.
Linden Lab doesn’t have to suffer swarms of tens of millions of people commenting. There are…700…people who comment on the forums. Of these, only X percent will comment on a viewer. So we’re not talking about the “masses” here, we’re talking about a genuinely open process, and one in which they also go to big mass constituencie and ask their leaders, like the heads of big island rentals, like the heads of big RP sims, etc. etc. People who actually work with the customers the Lindens have walled themselves off from.
It’s also about not accepting the closed society of open source, misnamed. Opensource culture favours fierce, authoritarian leaders, forced migration (”patch or GTFO”), slavish subordination to leaders, lack of due process and the rule of law in favour of anarchic sentiment and hedonism — it’s not a recipe for making *a society*.
The viewer isn’t about a different culture. It’s not about ease of use for socializers. Those are all merely myths the Lindens tell themselves and us to cover up a blanket, naked power play to seize back the inworld economy.
You couldn’t have achieved a better breaking of the economy than this viewer if you had planned it. And whoops, they did. Their opting of Google appliance methods is very political — it takes the single most authentic democratic and liberal expression of information inworld — merited traffic — and breaks and hides it, because it DIRECTLY competes with the Lindens’ scheme to drive sales to xstreet where they get commissions.
And that’s how the Internet went as well. Geeks took away site counters, and Google took over and made its algorithms proprietary for its ad agency, an its analytics wonky. The fallacy of “it’s gamed” was waved to claim that site counters — traffic — was no longer useful information.
Prok – sorry, you’re right about Mainland. It was the part I knew that I was referring to and I shouldn’t have used such a broad generalization.
And yes, Grace – time will tell. And as much as I’m an SL evangelist or supporter and as much as I think these changes are long overdue, I’m also experiencing a sinking feeling right about now. There may be short-term gain and maybe they can get it right, but I also feel like there’s the potential for a dilution of the assets which made SL what it is and that the larger potential to make a different kind of sense of our lives online will be lost.
And Prok hits it on the nose: the in-world economy has been cudgeled. And that’s not a good thing.
you seperate design from strategy and from engineering…
that is why you fail.
and btw- your last line….
“But the day I wake up and it really sinks in that my avatar has become a gadget is the day, I suppose, when I realize I didn’t do enough to make it not so. ”
terrible, sl avatars ARE gadgets… and thank god for it. its best you fail.
Yes, looks like he read and couldnt accept. Laniers book:) but then again neither could Lanier when he was enjoying metatech pundit in 1993.
Calling this new LL a ‘design’ process is a sad joke. Show me a Design Director at LL – anyone at executive level experience…. where are they?
Ideo and Frog founders need not apply:)
They are a technology company, now trying to spin engineering as a term. But as a business they are a tech company running a tech based pyramid plan on those who just dont get it.
The Design Process is ideal for solving problems, the tech process is ideal for changing them.
I want to toss in a couple things about Viewer 2 in the context of a guess at a plausible larger corporate strategy view of what’s going on here… I’d guess there is a huge benefit to the lab for Viewer 2, even if it does *nothing* to improve real usability and even if it only increases retention through first hour usability by some moderate percentage.
As an aside I suspect that if more people separated the new features, such as Shared Media web-like URL bar and Outfits, from the actual usability profile of the viewer, it would get far less kudos. The “new features” could easily have been put into the old UI with very minor changes.
Back to my original point… I will wait for the press release I think is not so far away, with some content along these lines, but not phrased quite this way (no, I have no inside information, and am just projecting what I think is a likely PR and marketing position given the publicly exposed actions of late):
Linden Lab announces a whole new experience. We’ve completely revamped the first hour and the viewer, paying close attention to making Second Life easier to “jump in to” and use. It works the way you expect it to – just like your browser, but 3D. We’ve made the grid safe for business, and cleaned up the stuff that used to give your HR people and executives the willies, and you can even run a classic webinar inworld, if that’s what you want to do. Maybe it even has a brand new name, to avoid the connection to all that history?
The message the broader world is supposed to hear:
If you’ve tried Second Life before, all that is gone and you should give it another try.
In other words, making the viewer look “all different” provides ammunition for the marketing claim that … is it 90%+ of people who tried it before and walked away saying “I don’t get it” or “Why would I do that? … folks who’d previously heard of or abandoned Second Life, or have heard previous press “should ignore all their previous experience, and all the previous sometimes not so favorable commentary and start over”, and that even the previous nay-sayers should be ignored, because “all the old rules don’t apply”. Oops. Wait a minute. That sounds a lot like the dot-com thinking “it’s all different now, and economics as you’ve known it doesn’t apply any more,” or is it web 2.0 “it’s all different now, and everyone is on social media and advertising is completely and forever dead,” or is it…
IF (I am saying if… seems plausible but I have not direct info as to whether this is true or not) this is the thinking about the real benefits, then previous culture doesn’t matter to much (to the strategists,) as a 5x jump in world size will eclipse the “current oldbies” anyway, and whether or not it’s easier doesn’t really matter to people who haven’t used it for ages – but may have recently been exposed to a lot of press that suggests that others are making great hay and “everyone else is not doing it, and after all look at Avatar – this is no longer weird”.
I guess the bottom line is that I’m suggesting that the core rationale for some of this likely does have nothing to do with balance against “the way it’s been” and is an attempt to create a blank-slate restart. As such it is high risk, and runs the risk of alienating the current user base before a new one comes online. This is part of another classic chart about the evolution of systems – transitioning from the early adopters to a mass audience through a trough that you either survive, or don’t.
Maybe I should give a tip of the hat to you, Dusan, as this is much more of a random walk than I usually write. Hopefully it’s interesting in some fashion.
Personally, I think the barriers to entry are mostly not in the viewer, and from personal experience with orienting “newbies” with both v1 and v2 viewers in some volume at this point, it sure doesn’t seem to be a significantly lower hurdle with v2. It feels slicker. It’s an interface that’s “more important” visually than the world in some ways, in a way that v1 was not. It looks and feels more like the raft of black Flash-based applications out there, which may reduce psychological “this is weird” reactions to the interface.
At the same time… that’s not what I find people have troubles with… and this viewer makes some things even harder to explain and figure out. Again – I separate “features” from interface design in my comments, as I do not believe them to be linked for many of the new features.
My apologies if this is too long and rambling… maybe it should have been a reply post on my blog…
yeah,
my last post was too strong and wasnt meant really as an attack on dusan.
there IS a strategy at work, not one that I think is quite fair for the many who invested time/money into a platform for a return beyond “entertainment” or social timesuck ala a facebook type app.
Design is a word thats getting misused or refocused on “surface” issues way too often….
interface isnt just SURFACE, its an agends…
and i dont see how a marketing design/promotions design agency like Big Spaceship, and Monetixe technology company like LL could have frankley been expected to produce anything else.
The fact that it dosnet show much to assist the “most developed users-inside the SL microgamed economy” is no surprise.
One can only wonder how many that use the- economy–social-methods- inworld – were the leads on the project, or its goals…..
avatars ARE an INTERFACE, but they are not the only element of an immersive media and its agenda when constructed as a service and commercial product.
I spend an inordinate amount of time working with residents sometimes just seconds old…most often it wasn’t the viewer they didn’t get…it was the goal.
The old question over and over…
“How do you *play* this game”?
“What can I do here”
“What is there to do”?
So if we think the viewer was for new residents… someone didn’t do their homework.
I see the direction Secondlife is heading is down the “Facebook Farmville” road.
Social media… a giant 3D chat room…
Dammit! Why *fix* what’s not broken… Unless the goal was to break it.
If those people didn’t stay the first time….they’re not going to stay the second.
It still looks like a quick money grab.
Millions of us? Didn’t I read somewhere recently that Phillip has said that at 1.7 million concurrency he would need every server Google has in the world.
So much for Linden Labs, “It just won’t scale.”
“Second Life is ready for business. It’s ready for a massive influx of new users. It’s ready to spread its wings and send out all kinds of messages and ads into the social media melting pot while we Tweet and post Flickr photos and do whatever else the Lab has planned to make sure the point is made that this is NOT the Second Life you once knew.”
Not noticeably more than this time last year, I think. It might be next year or the year after. Eventually an accretion of superficial changes adds up. What I see are steps towards a goal, but not the achievement of it. Not yet.
[...] With OpenSim the question was how to create a virtual world engine (yeah, yeah, the Apache of virtua… [...]
Dusan, SL customers are NOT gadgets – no matter how harsh Linden ‘throws a fit’.
Why would anyone waste at least 1-2GB a day of precious overhead bandwidth browsing the web via the SL client? Not to mention all the security issues with this tact, such as browser exploits.
SL is NOT mainstream. Neither will it become mainstream. There is no democracy in dealing with Kingdon, who seems to be a direct descendant of previous benevolents like Hitler and Stalin: Dictators and Communists who went forwards with their own sadistic and murderous plans.
Linden lovemakers, ‘mainstreamers’ etc often make things much worse for existing and future customers by praising almost every single decision Kingdon and his team makes. Like those new Russian history books (by Putin’s crew), criticals are omitted.
Though, sometimes, criticals do come in from the in-beds, albeit a little patchy.
How can SL become mainstream when almost everything is swept under the rug? With lovemakers et al pulling wool over people’s eyes at the same time.
Once again we dance around the edges of an issue that will break, or at least forever change SL:
Is this world social networking or fantasy?
Do others have a “right” to know anything about our RL or do we have a right to privacy, to maintaining the divide between SL and RL?
At the moment LL seems to be enabling social networking over fantasy (why is RL on page one of the new Profile for example?).
Care must be taken to preserve the fantasy of SL, after all some of us enjoy being dragons, or escorts, or aliens and do not want to confuse that with RL.
The “First Hour” experience has become an unfortunate euphemism for progress at the lab. Engineering teams need catch phrases like “a PC on every desktop”, and “Think Different” to help ideas gel and drive people toward customer goals. Otherwise, they get lost in so many implementation details that the goal of “making improvements” replaces the goal of “making a difference”. For the lab, the “First Hour” has become their marching song, and I believe Viewer 2 is a good example of what happens when engineers make improvement given vague goals. Viewer 2 is a distinction without a difference.
Years ago, Fred Wilson blogged about “we” companies and “they” companies (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2005/03/apple_becomes_a.html). I think his characterization is particularly relevant at this turning point in the lab’s history:
“… ‘We’ companies are built by and for a community of users. Everything (including profits) flows from this core value of serving the users. We companies and their profitability are incredibly sustainable. ‘They’ companies are traditional companies that seek to optimize profitability at the expense of everything else. These businesses are not sustainable and they tend to overreach and ultimately end up in a long and steady decline.”
I think the lab is at a dangerous turning point, moving from “we” to “they”.
Consider what “the first hour experience” means. To the best I can tell, it is based upon the naive belief that the user interface, and by extension the web portal, is the primary obstacle to growth. They have expended tremendous effort on this face-lift. They have focused on trying to make the interface more accessible to new users, and even to make the content more accessible. After all, what does shared media do best? It brings things known into a world unknown. It makes it easier to wallpaper the world with familiar patterns, useful tools, and create an envelope of familiarity. Even if it is a powerful tool for residents, it is an even more powerful tool for the lab to solve the problem of familiarity. If it weren’t, we would still be without it.
The “first hour” marching song is a song about the lab, not about it’s customers needs. For any of you who have been residents for a while, think back. I don’t remember anybody, ever, complaining that the first hour experience wasn’t very good. I heard people complaining about prices, about permissions, about attention to land owners rights. I heard complaints about search, about gaming the events system, about policies and about favoritism, about things which don’t rez, or sims which crash. People even seemed to rejoice in the intricacies of learning Second Life, like learning to fly a plane. And though many might characterize the interface as “too complex for the average people”, my first friends in Second Life were housewives and retired people many of whom were self-professed technophobes. I saw no evidence that the interface was anything other than a wonderful control panel for a new life. It was the new life, not the control panel, that was the purpose of being there.
Worse, Linden Lab began inventing customers using an idealized one-size-fits-all model that pinned “virtual world activities” on everybody’s business to-do list. If the lab needed confirmation that the user-interface was the problem, all they had to do was walk into the meeting rooms of corporate America and ask your average marketing executive why they didn’t want to use Second Life. To me this is analogous to taking a bunch of people at a shopping mall into a 747 cockpit and asking them about their product requirements. “Please, make it easier to fly.”
Dusan’s question about culture is a loaded one. It cuts right to the core. When Sarah and Amanda fumbled over their answers, it became obvious to me that Viewer 2 wasn’t about culture at all. It is purely about profit. It was at that moment that I thought about Fred Wilson’s posting from 5 years ago and realized that I was witnessing the transformation of a company that thinks primarily about its customers to a company that thinks primarily about itself.
It is even more interesting that “the first hour experience” has become so important to the lab, considering that it doesn’t appear on their home page. Wouldn’t that be interesting. Going to the home page and seeing a bold “What a First Hour it will be!” exclamation. That would be embarassing, but at least it would have connected engineering goals to the customer. Interestingly, the lab no long even has a slogan. The home page just says “Join the world’s largest, user-created, 3D virtual world community.” Ho hum.
I can imagine a dozen better slogans for engineers to march to. None of them would have been about Linden Lab’s marketing or perception problems. They would have been slogans about the culture, about the immersive experience, about the need to explore freely, engage quickly. Perhaps “It’s simple!” would have been a great slogan to see on the home page, inspiring engineers to link a marketable consumer concept with specific features that created a series of ah-ha moments that were just a click away.
But, even if I worked at it for hours, or weeks, or even if everybody here started blogging about slogans and engineeering marching songs trying to pick the best, I doubt that anybody would top the one I am thinking about right now.
Remember “Your World, Your Imagination”?
There was a slogan to write boldly on the blackboards of every entreprenurial course at every university in America. It was inspiring. I remember just staring at those words at the top of the Second Life site and thinking of how incredible it was to see such bold, inspiring words greeting new users. You didn’t even have to use the product to feel good about it. It made you want to walk around in the back yard sipping your morning coffee thinking of all the things you should be doing with your life, your aspirations, and priorities. And when you logged in, you saw it in action! You did! It revitalized your belief in people’s ability to create, to imagine, and to invent.
The lab just stopped thinking about such things. Maybe they took it for granted. Maybe in many ways M doesn’t even understand it, who knows. I remember his early “babe in the woods” comments about Second Life. Maybe he really believed that a website and UI redesign would do the trick.
But, there is no question in my mind that Linden Lab’s product is “culture”. No matter how much they revamp the viewer, they are not going to make it a “better WebEx”, or a “better meeting space” or a “better 3D design tool”. If they try to do that, they are ultimately headed for a slow-decline as better products start stealing their thunder.
The one thing they have created, that nobody else could, and to this day nobody can, is a special culture. It’s not the user interface they need to make more accessible, it’s the culture. That is the product that the lab needs to learn to make obvious, make acceptable, and break down barriers to understanding and embracing. And it is telling that Dusan was the one who had to mention it first.
Wiz – I’m speechless, what a superb analysis. I’m reinspired, enthused and sad all at once.
/me applauds Dusan and Wiz!
Dusan / Wiz – We agree vehemently about the importance and essence of culture. Culture is the “Phasing” part of “Phasing Grace”.
But I’m afraid that saying that the Lab’s product is culture, or implying that the created culture in my mind somehow devalues culture and everything it means.
The Lab is not equipped with the resources to produce culture, nor are they equipped to appreciate or nurture it, and some cases it would appear that they are taking steps to actually destroy any remnants of culture, or maybe they just lack any cultural sensitivity. Robin, Philip and even Cory walked out the door with the culture tokens.
This is from a post of mine in 2008: “This in fact, is the crux of Linden’s on-going problem. They are grokless, generally lacking so much of an inkling of their resident base, their passions, their normally predictably irrational behavior. They continue to miss the obvious, launching missiles at unarmed nations, killing off their own tin soldiers in an on-going series of blundering friendly fire. This general lack of awareness will be the demise of the virtual world of Second Life, not some up-and-comer in the virtual world space, but Linden Lab will in fact run themselves out of business because they have not, or can not, tap into the richness of their standing army of residents.” http://phasinggrace.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html
Therein lies the future.
Ty Dusan, Wiz et al.
I still believe and see good faith in the labs spirit though. I feel they are moving towards good stuff not only focusing on the viewer and this can be seen as a way to support “the culture”. Look at all the new community programmes they launch at the moment. Look at how active M. Linden participate upfront w. the community (as well as most other Lindens). Look at new progress for Solution Provider programme. Look at the more friendly policy with open source devs. Plus new viewer of which is still beta but the shared media feature is defo a winner. I am not sure I like all the so called social media inspiration they put in but anyway if it’s a way to increase user base it’s fine.
I agree with u Wiz I’ve seen many “housewifes” and not-tech-savy residents over the years who easy operates inworld. I’ve seen how easy my son at 6 year navigate in there. Still I’ve heard tons of people saying it’s so hard to learn so I am not really sure what makes sense on this. If u go buy a new TV u’ll get a remote control w. tons features but how many people actually use’em? Somehow SLs basics like walk, fly, sit etc. is very simple and not that hard to learn.
No matter how fancy and user friendly the viewer gets it won’t help out one of the core features for new users – to be able to find content inworld in an easy and fast way.
The old mantra at the lab saying “We deliver the platform you [the users] create the content” is over. Or at least the lab build bridges at the moment. And that’s actual needed and a cool step forward.
“They are grokless…”
That is a great summary, Grace, truly! You are right really. Saying that their product is culture is an over-simplification. It is the culture-building aspects of their product they don’t seem to be able understand or embrace. It is like any dysfunctional company, I suppose, that has a loyal and engaged customer base and just seems to be looking the other way instead of straight at the value they’ve built.
I surely see that they are trying, hard. I don’t think they are ignoring their customers, but as you said, they simply somehow missing the obvious!
Linden Lab, Grokless. I won’t forget that one!
I agree with Wiz, Grace and Claus – I really don’t think the Lab doesn’t have anything but the best of intentions, although I think their commercialization of every aspect of the virtual world experience is going to dilute their brand – it’s becoming a 3D shopping portal.
I’m reminded of M’s post when he pictured a future in which we go out to buy a dining room table, have it ‘auto-rezzed’ in our SL home, and then decide if we want to buy the real thing.
Um, and this is where we’re headed?
But their overall logic makes sense – more users, more innovation, less attrition, better first hour – growth is good, growth is sale, growth is IPO, and then, later, once we’ve done all THAT we can worry about all the intangibles like creativity, culture and art (token arts endowment aside).
I think they’re doing what any business would and should do which is to try to facilitate growth, but you can choose to grow or you can choose to change the world, and to do the latter you need to be going deeper than the first hour.
(But we’ll see what’s next, because they don’t seem to be done with their surprises just yet)
“But their overall logic makes sense – more users, more innovation, less attrition, better first hour – growth is good, growth is sale, growth is IPO, and then, later, once we’ve done all THAT we can worry about all the intangibles like creativity, culture and art (token arts endowment aside).”
good luck with that being the “right” approach. The gap between reality and fantasy grows. .
Um, Cube – that was sarcastic.
shows you how much your posts have gotten into la la land.;)
sounded as “real” as your avatars arent gadgets remarks;)
white noise anyway– as important as any metaplace or there blogging
[...] Maybe this is the reaction we’re SUPPOSED to be having now that Second Life is over and weR… [...]
Prok babbled: “Svarga is no more, sunk by its owner’s indifference or leftist poverty. She refused to figure out ways to sell content, or sell the script with the sims, being an ardent technocommunist, and here we all are, no Svarga, and she is the poorer. So praising Svarga is not acceptable, it was a failed model.”
You seem to me to be a sad sad person. Svarga was a piece of art, represented as it was. just because it wasn’t commoditized doesn’t make it a failed model. I’m sad to see it gone, but I don’t think turning a portion into a mall or having advertisements would have let it be what it was. If I couldn’t appreciate a piece of art if it’s temporary and not turned into a commercial product, then I’d go back to watching crappy prime time TV.
The problem with Svarga was that it was constructed in a medium that it could not be sustainable in within the creators desires.
They choose not to do what was needed to stay ” now” in a medium owned by LL that is driven by profits as the overiding goal.
Failed or Success isnt the real issue of Svarga, since it wasnt designed for its medium. The real question is “what will our culture look like with all its artifacts required to have been designed for the LL type medium?
The answer is not meta or new… its the main street in any surburb today. Look at any strip mall shopping plaza, and youll see how the market designs civic centers. Mediated media new?- not likely.
Balance required. In a year or so, someone will set up a “SVARGA” on a 20.00 a month server…that persons “art” has a longer “now” ability at that cost… but eventually it too will disappear, since the plug eventually(faster than previous medias as a general rule) gets pulled in virtuality.