So it’s the first day on the job as the new CEO of Linden Lab. You’ve done your homework, of course, and you spent time with Philip and maybe even Mitch or other board members. You’ve read a few of the blogs, tracked back through Google to do a sort of Second Life history lesson, and you’ve been mulling over what you learned at your last job.
You have a pretty good idea that the staff will be restless. And it’s true – most of them have been keeping their heads down the past few months, not a lot has actually been done other than a few token pokes at projects, and there’s none of the fervor that marked life at the Lab in the past, and maybe that’s a good thing. They smile happily when they meet you, but you can read the watchful waiting in their body language – something that says “OK, so what the hell are we going to do.”
The Second Life user community seems cranky about a few things but relatively calm. Without the benefit of having lived through several years of SL history, you might not really grasp how incredible the drop-off is in people writing or being passionate about Second Life….blogs that have gone silent may have had the benefit of reducing the level of drama, but this has also reduced the broader level of advocacy (and usually for very good reason).
But maybe that’s a good thing too. It’s not like the world is falling apart, exactly – things are stable or sputtering but not thriving, quiet but not exciting, and things don’t break as much as it seems they once did.
First day. Clean sheet.
We all know your mandate – build Second Life into something that someone, somewhere would want to buy. No pressure, no hard-and-fast deadline and we won’t say it in public, but let’s face it – there’s no IPO in the future, and while a profitable Linden Lab can put money in someone’s pocket, the end game here is sale and not some sort of endless annuity.
So, welcome to Linden Lab. All eyes are on you.
Your Imagination Unlocks a World of Play
I picked up a copy of Create, the game that Rod Humble, (the new CEO of Linden Lab) headed up while at EA (amongst other jobs). And it’s not such a bad game – but even better is the box, which has headlines that read:
- Spark Your Imagination! The game that rewards you for being creative
- Create your own scenes
- Use your imagination to unlock rewards
- Experiment to solve fun challenges
- Open up more ways to play
All of which is to say that Create is a sort of cartoonish version of the Second Life value proposition (although it’s probably a lot closer to a more complex version of Little Big Planet in terms of what it actually does) aimed at a much younger demographic.
Create takes the approach that you can facilitate user creativity by mapping out activities, learning and ‘making’ against rewards and unlocking points and so on. But the game mechanics shouldn’t distract from the fact that it’s primarily a toy rather than a game, with rewards and stages/phases that are more extrinsic than they tend to be in Second Life, unless you sell stuff or rent land.
His work on Create, and more specifically an interview he did with the Guardian give me some faith that he understands the main value proposition of Second Life: that when you help people to create things you are at the center of a deep kind of value – what some people call fun, but which can also unlock rewards of other kinds.
And so at a basic level, the idea of Second Life will be familiar to the Lab’s new CEO, he’ll get it (perhaps more handily than someone who comes from an ad agency, as Kingdon did) and with virtual goods and ‘user-generated content’ remaining buzz words in both Silicon Valley and on Wall Street (albeit with Second Life no longer considered even a remote contender for either) he’ll be working on ideas that are in favor with the Facebook/gaming crowd, albeit for a company that pretty much no one cares about anymore.
But for me at least Second Life takes us beyond ‘user-generated content’ and ‘virtual goods’ and it would be a mistake to now try to follow the buzz words that SL originally created, and that have been picked up by others. Second Life has taken us beyond, even, what it means to create a world.
To understand where Second Life can go from here, it’s important to understand that it is the place where, for many people, the future has been tested and we have come to an accommodation with a wider world of change.
User-Generated Content is Not a Business Model
I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last few months (well, even more so than usual I guess) – about how user-created content is reaching us in more places and how ‘older’ forms of content are finding new life and meaning, whether videos or TV shows or books or even old cartoons or magazines (re-purposed as iPad apps, say), because they are being accessed on new devices and in new formats and are thus more amendable than ever to being ‘remixed’ or (to use the current buzzword) curated.
This has been driven in particular because of the breathtaking growth of mobile computing and has led to an acceleration in the reach and impact of this new ‘digital/mobile/Internet everywhere’ world, rolling through (or over, depending how you look at it) one media, one area of life, and one industry after another (my own included).
A few years ago the idea of multi-screen access to entertainment seemed like it would remain the province of digital natives – Tweeting or “Facebooking” as they watched television or holding chats in YM or MSN with their friends. But at Christmas, I watched my father surfing an NFL iPad application as he watched a game on TV and I saw my mother texting information from Google maps that she was looking up on her new MacBook Pro. Maybe not the widest survey of consumers in the world, but a pretty good indication of how ubiquitous user-curated media consumption has become.
Now, in the business world or on Wall Street the idea of user-generated content is often interpreted as….well, as “we get stuff for free from our users”. And while there are times when Linden Lab has tipped from facilitating user-content to mining it, what makes Second Life fairly unique is that the platform owner is not the only party who can make money off of the users’ content, because of its unique combination of technology, economy, policy and community.
Tyler Cowen, who appeared on Metanomics, points out that user-generated content isn’t just the stuff we ‘make’, it’s the way that we parse, surf, edit, read, participate, comment, edit and append as we live more and more of our lives online. Through his book Create Your Own Economy he points out that value in the digital age has shifted. We are living in the new economy of, well, of “me” – meaning that value is no longer simply dispensed and consumed, but is dispensed and then achieves its value once we create our own meaning and context from it through the process of “curation”, remixing, editing, participation, and co-creation.
On Metanomics, he commented on how virtual worlds demonstrate this wider trend:
“I think what the web is and what Virtual Worlds are, it’s a blooming, buzzing confusion that can be intimidating or it can be bewildering. But the way you make it work for you is to go out there and literally impose order on it and use good filters, have ways of drawing from it what works for you, whether it’s your Twitter feed or RSS or what island you go to in Second Life. A world that appears completely unordered, in fact in each of our individual minds, a high degree of coherence and meaning, we do the ordering. It’s like we create these private worlds of our culture, using the powers of our own mind.
…I think we’re usually buying little dreams. We not only buy food and shelter, but when we choose styles or when we buy clothes with any kind of fashion, when we decide how we’re going to have our hair cut, we’re all, in a way, buying virtual goods because their importance exists only insofar as they are interpreted by other human beings. What’s important about them it’s not like their physical attributes, but, again, how they are interpreted by other people within this common framework of meaning.
So what Virtual Worlds do is, they take that common framework of meaning and somehow make that more explicit technologically, like there’s an actual virtual space. But I think it’s copying something we’ve been doing all along, I think that’s a big part of why it’s powerful, actually very natural. It’s very biological, I think. People think of Virtual Worlds as like contrary to biology or contrary to what they call atomic space.”
To Cowen, an economist, the economy of today is self-created – we assemble value on our own through our process of both creation but also through our acts of parsing the imaginative acts of others.
But the phrase I love best: “I think we’re usually buying little dreams.”
In this context, he’s referring to tangible goods – and making the important point that even physical goods aren’t always about their tangible aspects (excepting commodities, although even that can be argued), but their cultural connotations and meaning. The economy of things has become, even before this digital age, an economy of shared context and meaning (because ‘goods’ had continued to shift beyond the commodities necessary for survival) – an economy which to date had been largely facilitated by broadcast and mass media and distribution.
But in the digital age, we can still share and communicate this framework of meaning but with a difference – because the site in which that meaning is communicated allows for deeper personalization and choice, and the creation of the artifacts from which meaning is constructed are accessible to everyone, are more democratic, and aren’t reliant on a few delivery points or distribution channels.
The hammer force reality of this, if you take it to its deepest extremes, is that this capacity, which has been facilitated by digital technology, is upending nearly everything.
Because whether we’re going to the doctor’s office or going to work, whether we’re headed on vacation or to a concert, whether we’re watching TV or reading a book on our Kindle – we have become accustomed (or feel entitled, depending on what you’re talking about or your point of view) to a world that offers us the ability to curate, to remix, to choose, and to assemble experiences that fulfill our own personal definition of dreams rather than simply to adopt the assembled dreams of others.
In the developed world, this process of assembly and curation is most often associated with the media we consume.
But over the past year I’ve seen how powerful this notion is not just in its impact on how we entertain ourselves or connect with others….but in how entire industries and enterprises are structured, the meaning and construction of the jobs we do, and the expectations we place on the wider culture and institutions (which increasingly seem like relics in a more fluid and dynamic landscape). In the industries that I work in, which once seemed as immutable as possible in the face of change, I’m seeing one foundation stone after another crumble in the face of our individual ability to assemble dreams. (And I can’t help thinking that the implications for the developing world are staggering.)
Second Life is not a virtual goods platform, and it’s doesn’t have a business model based on user-generated goods: it is, instead, a fully contained prototype of a version of the future in which technology has continued to take us in the direction of limitless choice in how the world we live in is constructed, how we decide to interact with each other and the content that we choose to consume.
The business model of Linden Lab is to develop and support the tools that allow users to participate in an online environment in which they have a maximum amount of choice in how their digital lives are constructed and curated, and to be a transactional partner in the “buying of little dreams“.
The Mission: Second Life, Enhancing Our Humanity
Linden Lab is nowhere near fulfilling its mission to ‘connect us all to an online world that advances the human condition.’
To many people, however, Second Life has positively advanced their condition, whether in tangible monetary ways, or in the less tangible ways of creating connections where there were none, overcoming the constraints of geography, or providing access to safe communities from places where safety wasn’t a given.
But I believe that for many people Second Life has done something equally important: it has allowed an understanding of what it means that we are all connecting to an online world, and I’d propose that this meaning is perhaps more important than being connected in the first place.
Because in the face of the enabling, terrifying, and cataclysmic change that comes when we “connect us all to an online world” making sense of it alll has a deep and profound relevance.
In Second Life individuals and organizations have discovered a way to explore the meaning of a world in which the tools for content creation are democratically accessible; it has allowed us to grapple with issues of community and trust in a world where ‘identity’ is not as transparent as even conventional wisdom (insofar as Mark Zuckerberg represents conventional wisdom) would have us believe; it has provided us insight into how value can be created collaboratively, across time zones and bridging physical abilities and disabilities; it has provided a test bed for exploring issues of ownership and monetization in the face of the idea that all digital content is copyable and therefore value-less (and was able to put the lie to this notion as an axiomatic truth); it has helped us to understand the power of creativity to shape opinion, feeling and understanding by allowing us to stand inside the creative process and to remove the distance between author and ‘reader’, creator and consumer; and it has helped us to explore what it means to be human, to be ourselves by, ironically, placing a distance between who we ‘really’ are and the avatars that represent us.
This meaning isn’t always easy to articulate, and maybe it doesn’t seem obvious watching a bunch of avatars out dancing – but if you dig deep enough, or ask the right questions, you’ll discover the things that Tom Boellstorff discovered in his anthropology of Second Life (required reading for any LL CEO), who I interviewed a year or so ago, and who saw in something as seemingly insignificant as “AFK” or the use of the term “lag” a wider meaning:
Clifford Geertz, who’s a very famous anthropologist, once said something along the lines that anthropology often involves sort of hacking back and forth between the most local of local detail and the most sort of global of global issues to try and bring them both into clearer view.
And that often what you, you know, what you want to do with this kind of stuff, what as an anthropologist I try and do is look at the really obvious everyday stuff, whether that’s AFK or lag or building or whatever it is, but then also try if I can to step back and say okay, what’s some of the big picture stuff that’s going on here? What can we learn from this? You know, learning about AFK that’s cool. But then are there any bigger take-home points or broader issues that we can look at.
So when I try to, tried to sort of step back from this research I’d done in Second Life, to step back and say okay, what were some of the really big picture issues that might be interesting, even to people who could care less about virtual worlds or you know, to anyone sort of interested in contemporary life. What can we take home from virtual worlds, take home to think about things more broadly?
So after just reading around, thinking about things, because this is about technology, I started, you know, what does technology mean, where does that word come from? And so I got interested in this idea that technology is rooted linguistically in action, in the term techne, meaning something much more like craft or arts.
And so that was interesting to me, that techne is about art or craft. I immediately started thinking about how important building and making things is in Second Life. And then I started looking at – there’s as whole range of philosophers and thinkers who for a long time now have been talking about how in the original formulation, techne’s opposite is knowledge, or episteme.
Claude Shannon and all these people who did this early cybernetics work, it was all about information, right, the mode of information and all this, all this kind of stuff that they were talking about. And so I just sort of kept putting these pieces together in my head, right, going back and forth between the everyday experience I’ve had in Second Life and the writing I’d done about Second Life on the one hand, and then on the other hand, this interesting stuff about knowledge versus craft.
And then it got me thinking what’s happening here where in what’s supposed to be the age of information, we’re getting all of this stuff happening in virtual worlds about craft, not about knowing about houses in Second Life, but about building a house in Second Life. Building relationships and all the crafting stuff seems to be so important.
And so that’s why the third part of my book is called the Age of Techne. It’s asks: what if this actually may be not the age of information or only information, but about the age of craft or about sort of a new working towards craft. I mean I can make a house and live in the house, but that isn’t quite the same thing as what’s happening in Second Life, where it’s like craft sort of turns back on itself and you have craft creating the whole world that you’re living in.
And so what does that do to the way we think about craft and the way that we think about knowledge? And it’s really at that point then that I really start to really question no, I don’t have the answers, I don’t know entirely where that’s going. But I am pretty sure that I’m onto something, that there’s something going on with that.
That there’s something about virtual worlds and it’s opening up new possibilities for crafting, new definitions of what it means to craft and how might that change the idea of even like friendships and relationships, that you craft them in a certain sense.
To Boellstorff, Second Life offers insight into a future in which our notion of technology can be rooted in our ability to craft and in so doing, to take ownership of a future outside of the conventional view in which our world is governed by the algorithm of data.
Advancing the human condition is a noble goal – and in many ways the Lab will continue to move towards this goal because of the power that Second Life has to help people to understand how our collective connection to online worlds has a profound meaning. It allows us to discover this meaning through casual social interactions, participation in art, falling in love, creation – all of those things which may seem ‘trivial’ but which are windows to the wider implications of a connected world. And in so discovering, Second Life helps us to recognize the power we have as individuals to influence the direction of our lives online – a direction which, in my world at least, includes technology that prefers virtual hugs to pokes, which treasures serendipity over algorithmic certainty, and that provides a richer meaning than what we visualize when we think of the social graph.
The Strategy is NOT Fast, Fun and Easy
Linden Lab is a victim of wishful thinking. Time and again it tries to tackle the same problem using pretty much the same solution and thinking that, somehow, this time, the outcome will be different.
And the wishful thinking goes like this:
- Second Life would succeed if it had more users. More users are good because they can benefit the virtual economy, they can increase the use of ‘land’, and lead to all kinds of other activity.
- The problem with increasing the number of users isn’t finding new users, it’s in keeping them once they arrive. The data shows it – run a banner ad, and you’ll have people show up on the home page. It’s not an issue of attracting people, it’s an issue of retaining them through the funnel of sign-up, first hour, first week, first purchase.
- Therefore, the primary issue is retention.
- If this is the primary issue, then we need to look at the reasons for a lack of retention. These issues are multi-factorial, but they typically come down to a few things: it’s too hard to sign-up, it’s too hard to learn and use the interface, and it’s too hard to find people/things to do.
- The solution, therefore, is to overhaul sign-up, change the interface, and come up with new ways to search and find content.
There is absolutely NO evidence that a new take on this old strategy will work now when it has never worked in the past.
You can throw everything at this problem: you can introduce new “light clients”, you can put Second Life on cell phones, you can throw Unity3D clients at the front end, you can have a browser-based viewer, you can assign mentors or put in place Community Gateways….heck, you can even PAY people to log-in and stick around (whether that “pay” is with free virtual goods, or a free Linden Home, or some kind of points or awards system). They won’t work, or if they work the results will be temporary or yield an incredibly disappointing return on investment (just ask Tom Hale how his investment in ‘making bank’ went, or how well a new Viewer did in influencing sign-up and retention).
From Mitch Kapor through Philip Rosedale and on to Mark Kingdon, everyone who has ever had a word to say about Second Life has looked at the issue of how to grow the world in the same way and failed.
And the reason they’ve failed is that, first, it’s the wrong problem. And second, you can’t design the future solely by extrapolating from past data…and yet time and again, we’ve seen from Linden Lab a reliance on past data as the main metric for planning the future.
For a company as ‘visionary’ as Linden Lab is supposed to be they have continually acted like – well, like engineers I guess. But even engineers can be design thinkers and turn the impossible (an online music industry in an era of Napster) into the merely improbable (the iPod).
This may seem counter-intuitive. It may seem counter-productive. But I’d propose that Linden Lab spend almost zero time worrying about new users or advertising to new users or marketing to them and devote all of its time to helping its current users to have better experiences. It may seem, coming from a current user, that this is a bit self-serving.
But I’m willing to stake whatever it takes on a simple precept: if you tackle the problem of Second Life by tackling it through the eyes of current users, you’ll have more new users than you know what to do with.
And the reason for this is that Second Life is, in the end, a technology that facilitates experiences, and the experiences which it facilitates are created by current users.
See, my dad may love his iPad because it’s fast, easy and fun. But he also loves his television set which takes three converters to turn on and operate. Even now when I go home and watch a DVD with my parents we can still get into confusion about which converter does what – one controls the volume, one the channel, one the DVD. But you navigate through all of that complexity because of the experience of watching the show.
It’s not the box. It’s not the converter. It’s the fact that there’s a show or movie or football game to watch in the first place. (Having said all that, television itself has lost its way, and there are very few shows on it anymore which are worth the pain of learning how to juggle three converters).
And I’d propose that as fast/easy/fun as the iPad might be, if it didn’t have any “channels” on it that my dad wanted to watch, it would end up on the shelf gathering dust and he’d be claiming that it was too hard to learn rather than just saying: well, there was nothing on.
Fast, Easy and Fun is an important benefit but it’s not a strategy.
The first task is making sure that people can create great experiences – and thankfully, the Lab has actually made significant progress on this over the last few years. By reducing crashes, improving voice, reducing load times and a whole bunch of other things the experiences that people can create are more reliable. The tools for creating “content” are robust and getting better and things like mesh and (please?) standard scripting languages will move this capacity even further.
But while the virtual part of the world is in better shape, the social part of that experience is mind-bogglingly awful.
Focus on how to help users do the things they need to do, and most importantly do so in a way that looks beyond the walls of the virtual world.
And this is critical, because if you think about improving the current user experience solely from the perspective of what happens in the world (or on its associated Web sites) you’ll end up with a laundry list of things like lag, search and all the rest of it. But users need to be viewed more holistically.
Second Life is part of a wider engagement with technology, and yet trying to do anything so that it is simple and effective is nearly impossible.
Try managing a group. Try to send out a notice for an event using multiple platforms (Facebook, e-mail, groups). Try inviting a bunch of friends who have never been in Second Life to join you in your virtual beach house to watch a movie. Try creating virtual art and inviting a potential patron to see it. Try being a musician and promoting a concert on Facebook.
The problem isn’t that the interface is hard to use. The problem is that the current users have no reliable way to get the word out, no reliable way to bring people in, and no reliable way to manage their connection to those people once they arrive.
The marketing platform, the promotion, the word of mouth, the viral campaigns, the source of marketing – are the current users. Linden Lab may have created the converter, but the current users have the show, they have the content, and they simply need a way to reliably put their shows on, and far, far, far better ways to let the world know to tune in now.
A New World
Second Life can succeed because it still has the capacity to deliver content experiences that are unique and profound. It can succeed if the Lab stops worrying about the funnel coming in, and worries instead about the funnel headed the other direction.
When I think about Metanomics, what I think of is a massive missed opportunity. I would LOVE to promote it more widely, to have Google Alerts and Facebook ads, to send out widgets to blogs across the Web and to tap into e-mail lists. And we do a lot of that….but those tools should be de facto standard things provided by Linden Lab.
We have incredible content and we have a stable platform on which to ‘perform’ that content, and yet we’re working with a platform provider who seemingly has no interest in making it easy for us to build and maintain a community – and, shockingly, this is true within Second Life as much as in our ability to reach out to wider markets.
Groups don’t work, advertising doesn’t work, search is ineffective, there are no e-mail channels, few Web channels, few ways to reach out to current users let alone reach out to the crowds on Facebook except by our own effort.
I mean – if you’re a game developer you look to develop your game on a platform that provides more than technology – you’re looking for a platform that can also provide distribution, advertising, promotion, support.
So, it’s not really that complicated. Start with the user base you’ve got and help them to help you.
In so doing, you’ll realize that your advertising is suited to an age demographic which (mostly) doesn’t exist in Second Life, that the key to growing the platform is in attracting groups not individuals, and that in shunning enterprise and education you’ve neglected important voices in a world shaped by imagination, and narrowed the choices we can make as we craft the future.
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it.
Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.
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Well said!
I would be grateful just to be able to use group chat – so many of our group log in just to chat socially and the broken group chat makes something that seemingly simple impossible.
And having IMs and notecards “capping” in this age is just silly.
These are both “ancient” technologies by modern standards and yet LL cannot get either functional.
We continue to wait and hope
I do believe this is the most error-ridden thing you’ve ever written, and by that, I mean typographical, not factual. I get the DEFINITE impression that this was driven out of you at speed, that you had a passionate fury to get the words out, to get it down beyond mundane concerns of grammar. I don’t often feel that reading your posts. This was phenomenal.
I don’t often say this, either, but thank you for writing this. And let us both pray the Lindens manage to hear.
Great post!
To me, the essential bit is near the end. Linden Lab needs to focus on satisfying existing users as a means to attracting new users, rather than focusing on quixotic schemes to attract new users directly.
I am spending all my SL time lately as a consumer. I no longer do any business in SL, I just go to clubs and listen to music and dance and chat. It’s a completely different perspective. I enjoy it.
I am pessimistic about the future of SL. I think the service will keep running a year or a few years, as long as it makes financial sense to keep it open. It will never be more popular than it is today. That sounds gloomy, but I don’t mean it that way. I enjoy each day in SL for itself. And the people who created SL will go on to create other great things.
Nice blog post, Dusan! I was not really on par with the first section, but most of the rest I see as spot on.
Something to consider, is that for a world as complex as SL, it takes alot of time to create a complex game or environment, like you might see with a facebook game. SL has all the visuals, but the complex gaming part take alot of time to figure out, especially when some viewer bugs just never get fixed. In a completely free market envirnoment, without much investment coming in from other sources, 1 has to find a way to just survive first, before 1 have the time to create something that engaging.
Plus, it takes time to just find the right team of people to create with and leaders to form.
Now, tho, I think if you look around in SL, there are some really advanced things, games, environments, and machinimas starting to be created. I think we might be entering, finally, into a type of Moore’s Law, in SL.
Things have to be done with more foresight tho. Developers and creators need a stable environment to create in. Merchants having to go back and redo products because of bugs or changes, is nonproductive time. This past year, I’ve spent just as much time dealing with changes than time I’ve spent creating.
It was realy nicely said. And i like the analogy with a TV. You are right, there is lots of barriers, like finding remote controll, push the right botten and set up volume and the channel. I love it. Completely same with SL, but in SL there is not the Big brother show, there is not the socker much or Unplugged. At least, it is impossible to find it.
You also mentioned interesting and today realy needed point. Lets focuse on groups, not individuals. I am member of couple groups dealing with education and every activity ends with question: how may i invite others (lets consider FB event invitation) and to be honest, quite often it ends with the time (i am from Europe and most interesting events are held behind the ocean during my night – but there is nothing to do about).
LL needs strong community servise, where everyone can post the event, add tag and invite friends and professionals (without complicated signing up).
This is well written and said. One can understand why the Lindens would offer free houses and try to bring more people in. It reminds me of how we have tried to recruit people to the roleplay sim that I’m involved in. For the longest time we’d stop what we were doing when someone new arrived and focus on trying to make the new people feel welcome. Almost all just hung out for a bit and took off. So we changed focus and while still welcoming, are trying to concentrate on having just tons and tons of infectious fun among our veterans. Not surprisingly, we’re having a resurgence as word gets around. This column helps me understand why that’s a better strategy: people are attracted by fun, good company and excellence, not by the act of outreach itself.
Very well said.
“To Boellstorff, Second Life offers insight into a future in which our notion of technology isn’t solely rooted in the concept of information (techne), but in our ability to craft (episteme)”
Did I miss a subtle point here, or have you put the Greek words in reversed positions?
Great article, Dusan.
Great post, indeed. (But Emilly Orr is kinda right about the writing errors. Glaring: in the paragraph that begins “To Boellstorff, Second Life offers insight…”, the parenthetical mentions of techne and episteme are reversed; each is where the other should be. Might wanna fix that.)
Thanks for the comments everyone, and especially for picking up the techne/episteme error, since corrected. Sorry Emily if it’s riddled with other errors – I guess that’s the challenge of writing so late at night. I’ll do another proof and see if I can catch them.
@Mitch – I hold out hope but for me, at least, it isn’t important that Second Life grows. I kind of like it the way it is. My customers come in as small groups and they don’t need a huge Grid to feel like they’re on a platform that’s working. So I’d be perfectly happy with SL kind of slowly improving but not being the “new new thing”.
However, I do think that the wider world has a lot to learn from the experience of SL, its particular take on issues like identity and DRM, content creation and community – and from that perspective the more people who come in the better.
Medhue – I don’t think it’s the Lab’s job to create the ‘channels’ or shows or the things that are engaging, the game play, whatever. I think it’s the Lab’s job to provide a stable environment and to help users (’creators’, designers, residents, musicians, whoever) to create their own connections and ways to promote.
The benefit of a resident-facing strategy is that eventually the Lab can go out to others – Indy game developers, music um agents or producers or bands, event management companies – and say “Look, we’ve made it easy to come in and create great experiences and we’ve made it easy to support those experiences with the advertising, promotion and community building that you need to be a success, why don’t you come and join our commununity.”
Right now, I’d have a hard time saying that credibly to anyone because the reality is “We have a platform which is pretty amazing for the rapid creation of rich 3D content but beyond that you’re on your own.”
You are absolutely right that Linden Lab has failed time and time again because rather than focusing almost entirely on improving the experience for the people who actually showed up the company was always looking for and trying to please that magic demographic just over the next hill. But the other half of the failure is the company spent too much time looking at the technology as something more profound than it is or at least the company’s place in the scheme of things. Linden Lab rents server space. Content creators sell dreams; or give them away.
The tools for creating those dreams have changed relatively little, though players themselves have come with interesting aids for everything from making clothes to script generation to terra-forming. The innovations by Linden Lab have been rejected or ignored if they are found to challenge the goal of the majority of players who don’t make anything, which is just to have fun and rightly so. If Linden Lab had constantly made content creation easier, not just fancier, and focused on improving the environment and making enjoyment of the game possible for the largest possible group of players, with a selection of official viewers or whatever the case may be, not just the ones with the latest hardware, and made an effort to keep up with the dropping prices of server space and pass those savings on to players not just those who held a lot of virtual land, things might have turned out differently. I’m not sure how much ground the lab can recover but who knows?
The things you suggest about community and the greater meaning of it all are important and well said but they are like the meaning of art to viewers in a museum –not the job of the manager to be concerned with. His job is to keep the museum nice to be in and secure and to preserve the art.
Bravo.
Ptah – I completely agree….1,000,000 percent. That was the problem with Philip, in fact…while ideals and vision are critical, especially in the founding phases, at some point it needs to be turned over to ‘management’ and I feel that he probably left that too long. At the point that SL saw its growth spurt (which happened, by the way, in spite a crappy sign-up experience, a crappy interface and all the rest of it) he should have parachuted in a proper management team rather than hoping that the Love Machine and being visiony would see him through.
Having said all that, the larger picture is still, I think, important – both for the people who use and enjoy SL and are customers of Linden Lab and for the staff and management. I mean, I’d like to think that while collectively the Lab hasn’t been a case study in effective management or organizational design, the people who work there are (for the most part) actually fairly committed to the idea that they’re involved in something with a larger meaning than selling virtual shoes.
The museum manager keeps the space secure and preserves the art, but he can also go home at night and tell his family that he helped make the world a slightly more enlightened place.
[...] you haven’t read Dusan Writer’s post with advice to Linden Lab’s incoming CEO, you should. I hope that someone at the Lab is paying attention. We have incredible content and we [...]
Excellent post, Dusan.
You said “But while the virtual part of the world is in better shape, the social part of that experience is mind-bogglingly awful.”
This has always been a challenge for SL, and I think it stems from a core development meme that was the bedrock of the culture at LL from its inception. Which is “we’re making a world where you can build stuff.” I ran across this a lot during my 5 years working at LL. It was a challenge to convince devs to spend time coding new social functionality. I remember spending months advocating internally at LL to simply add the ability to see when someone else is typing in an IM window (a critical social cue to facilitate smooth synchronous IM messages). Eventually I convinced folks it was worthwhile to add that feature, but it was a challenge just to add such a small bit of social functionality.
The focus, in my experience, was always on content creation and overall underlying infrastructure. That’s not a *bad* focus, but one that I feel must be tempered with significant thought about social tools. I hope LL realizes this. They still have a great chance to add a lot of new social functionality, and to fix what currently exists. I wish them all the luck in the world.
You also talked about how “user generated content is not a business model.” I’m not sure I fully agree with you on that. The bottom line is, if you’re using a service and not paying for it, you’re not a customer. You’re part of the product. At least that’s how all successful businesses see it.
Excellent. I agree with the wider sentiments expressed, but to give one concrete example, in my other role as occasional SL musician I’ve despaired at the difficulties of getting the word out about gigs. Now I’m contemplating resurrecting the ‘Reel Folk’ gigs, but really struggle to see how I’d promote them with the current state of things. So thanks again for that post and fingers crossed someone is listening.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by MetaMeets. MetaMeets said: RT @Pathfinder: Thoughtful post by @Dusanwriter on "SECOND LIFE NEXT: 2011." My comment here: http://bit.ly/ej1Z8f [...]
[...] He recently wrote a very thoughtful and interesting blog post titled “SECOND LIFE NEXT: 2011.“ [...]
I felt compelled to write a blog post following up on my comment about “being part of the product.” Thanks for the inspiration, Dusan.
http://becunningandfulloftricks.com/2011/01/09/on-being-part-of-the-product/
Very good take Dusan. So many wise words already been said.
To me it makes sense to start focus more on content as many first time users seems to leave SL due to lack of “where to go” or “what to do”.
My two cents (and I’m not into starting a long thread on the “Search” issue but just sayin’
)
Make it easier to find content.
Make thesaurus of subjects. Right now we have some 1.800 places to go via Destination Guide but the indexing is poor.
To make search better try use an oldfashioned index model where region owners have to file their content before posting and include it in search. Then add editorial reviews to avoid spam.
The challenge is many regions are not like filing traditional media like a book of some science. Regions are immersive experiences and many have more than one subject well some are worlds in their own rights.
Look into how librarians have filed and catalogued “the world” during a century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Decimal_Classification.
Recently I made a test in Destination Guide and asked myself (pretending I was a n00b) various informational needs. I realized I had to click like 8-10 times to find the exact content if I was even lucky enough to find it. Nowadays people have zero patience and 8 clicks is far more than acceptable.
I am fully aware this ain’t simple but finding content in an easy fast way is urgent not only in Second Life but in virtual worlds in general in time to come.
And you mention this too between the lines.
Make easier tools to communicate.
Each time I host events or post important notices to my community it’s a pain. I have to post inworld notecards, blogposts, emails, Facebook notices, Twitter etc. There must be a way to simplify all these channels and synch it all.
Not to mention the importance of making group chat stable.
Happy New Year and best of luck to Rod
it would be boring if everything was fixed before he started .
Paathfinder:
Thanks for the comment and it’s interesting to hear a perspective based on inside experience at the Lab. So does that mean that all those Facebook “like” buttons all over the SL Web site were agonizing to put in place?
You’re right in a sense – user-generated content can be the source of value to end customers. Facebook is the primary example, or Twitter maybe (once it figures out how to make money) – the customer is an advertiser, the content that users create is part of the product that allows those advertisers to reach them.
But I’d argue that for Second Life this model is misleading, and I worry whenever I hear someone infer that virtual goods or USG is the Linden Lab business model.
The business model is “we primarily rent servers because we facilitate the creation of content.” The customer and the creator of the content are often the same person. This is decidedly different than the ‘usual’ view of USG in which a group of people (consumers, usually) create content which allows monetization through separate customer channels (usually advertisers).
The Lab would do itself a favor if it would stop thinking of itself as being a USG platform like Twitter or Facebook, and would stop calling itself a virtual goods business.
Linden Lab is a technology company that creates and supports the tools for developing and promoting (the latter poorly) experiences.
It makes money if it’s able to do this well because people will pay to have access to the tools which allow this.
That’s a different value proposition than “have a bunch of people make stuff and then find ways to monetize their efforts.”
Or maybe I’m quibbling semantics.
@Dusan Good points.
I think part of the challenge for LL is simply the *existence* of their primary revenue stream. At the end of the day, they make most of their $ as a hosting company. LL has publicly stated this in the past. And this fact makes it a challenge for them to look at completely novel revenue streams or business models. “Hey, we’re making all this $ renting regions. Let’s do more of that!”
Many other possibilities exist. But when you have a decent hammer in your hands, everything tends to look like a nail.
Oh, I was talking about the residents and the creators needing time to create engaging things, not LL. LL can’t even fix 4 year old bugs, the last thing I would ask them to do is create a game or whatever.
If you ask me, the genius of SL is that it plays upon the thing that makes us all human. The act of complex creation is exclusively something that only humans can do. Creating in SL is akin to being your own GOD. It hits at the essence of what it is to be human, and to create.
Dusan, I agree that it is SL’s residents that are most important to promoting SL. Most natural growth happens with word of mouth. Traditional mass marketing promotions only speed up the process.
Something easy that I think LL can do, to more organize the word of mouth, would be to have video contests. The winners being the 1’s with the most views on Youtube. In doing this, they turn a contest into a massive SL promotion with probably hundreds of videos made, all relating to the same topic.
This is my major ongoing bugbear with the Lab – they should _not_ subscribe to the usual “get users to hang around by encouraging them to make content, and sell them to advertisers” model (which I think is becoming increasingly less viable anyway, and perhaps never was, but that is a different story). Another dead model is “make it easy for one group of people to sell virtual widgets to other people” – that doesn’t describe what people actually do in SL.
A lot of it rests I think on a misunderstanding of what “content” is. Very few people visit SL, or go to any social platform for that matter, to experience an entire environment created by someone else – if one is going to do that, why not play any number of other games which are much better at the job? Instead people come because they can be participants, they can chat and organise things themselves and use those virtual widgets to mutually create an environment where, coincidentally, other people will buy virtual widgets.
Those people – residents – create huge quantities of vital social content for each other which keeps them all there and they need, as you say, to be aided by both better social and informational facilities and better in/out APIs, and less deliberate distinction between “creators” and “consumers”. The sneery old “99% of users don’t create anything” attitude is and always has been bunk. Linking prims and making textures and writing scripts is just one aspect of creation.
When I make – or made – items for sale, as far as I am concerned they are elements of a story of my own, that other people can take and use to make their own stories, the combination of which make up the whole shared story that we call SL. Or simply “life” in general. Society and communication is absolutely crucial to this. Widgets, in comparison, are nothing.
This is the out-world newbie’s viewpoint http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=4237776&l=14a5e3280a&id=622664200
Well said Ordinal.
In my post I summarize the LL business model (my version of it) as follows:
The business model of Linden Lab is to develop and support the tools that allow users to participate in an online environment in which they have a maximum amount of choice in how their digital lives are constructed and curated, and to be a transactional partner in the “buying of little dreams“.
The version in my response to Pathfinder was meant to leverage his “user-generated content” concept, but I prefer my original.
And P.S.:
“The sneery old “99% of users don’t create anything” attitude is and always has been bunk. Linking prims and making textures and writing scripts is just one aspect of creation.”
Couldn’t agree more as I’ve said before.
Outstanding. You almost make me sad again about how LL treated educators, who were some of the loudest evangelists when I rezzed in 2007.
No so much any longer and certainly not in my case. Meanwhile, I just saw the work of some noted SL artists at InWorldz: another group that LL had best not lose to grids with lower tier and active communities.
Time and tide are running against Mr. Humble.
This analysis gets my vote, Dusan.
I hope Mr. Humble will remind his employees that they can’t do what they do in SL in any other job in the world. Beyond making LL IPO-ready, there is still an opportunity to make new history.
I would also encourage Mr. Humble to look amongst the residents to assist him and the company in devising improved retention programs. I have never understood why people who hardly use SL are often the ones selected by LL to do this.
Well crafted analysis.
My two cents: I believe that SL has to do something that will allow avatars to more reflect the real people who pull their strings. I just don’t understand why Kapor’s hands free SL was abandoned.
Cent two: Ditto to anyone who said the building tools are moribund.
DS
@Ordinal, very good points about “content creators.”
I agree that content is more than stuff. It’s also the stories and conversations and communities around things and places. And the acts of collaborative creation that happen as a result of those communities.
That’s the special sauce of malleable virtual worlds like SL.
Its still a cult. not a tools buisness.
And this was the issue they have been called out for by others for 9 years.
And EA dosent make tools either. More games and circuses to come. And yes. Adobe also didnt want to make and sell tools for the last 7 years.
This, plus the delusion of technology based “world making” that exists in the tech culture, is what will continue to harm us all.
Bravo, Dusan!
There is a local jazz musician and peace activist in my town, and I have been working on getting him into Second Life for more than a year. But all of the things you mentioned are exactly the problem. I can certainly find several folks from the Metanomics community who will help with the technical end of things. I can help him make an avatar that reflects his real life appearance and sense of humor, but first I have to get him up to speed on the basics of SL. Okay, so we do this all the time, but each time it is the same: Hold your breath and wait to make sure he doesn’t run screaming from the coffee shop in frustration. Then there is the advertising in multiple media, then getting his friends in for the show, then…what will keep him coming back to SL, once the show is over and the guide-at-the-side isn’t there? How will he find the groups that are his natural allies? How does a beginner keep in touch with their fans from the first week?
The other big issue is customer service. To keep the current users happy, there has to be some clue about providing more customer service, not less, not narrowed to California business hours, not absent on weekends. Minimal standards of decent care should be easy to fix.
I agree with almost everything in this article/blog post whatever you name it (and thanks to Tateru Nino who linked to it!)
What I disagree though, and to 100%, is the alleged importance of connection to “social network” data miners or to e-mail, or to Twitter and other RL-related internet media.
I don’t want SL to become a 3D-FacebookMySpaceWhatever at all. I wouldn’t even mind if Linden Lab chose to remove those “Share”, Facebook and Twitter buttons from both the fugly web-based profiles and the Dashboard again – and from the blogorum.
It’s unfortunately obvious that Linden Lab hasn’t listened to current customers at all, but rather made a client, that was developed by people with no clue about SL and with no long-time experience in SL, the new official viewer. Instead of focusing on working the Jira and improving the world’s performance and stability they introduced unimportant things like voice changer (I would even consider the alleged importance of Voice in SL debatable) or the removal of Last Names, etcetera… And always by playing claqueur in the blogorums. To be honest, sometimes I even get the impression that many Linden Lab employees don’t even know what SL actually is or can be for most of the current residents.
An old merchant in my RL hometown once taught me: “Always satisfy your current customers, because word of mouth does work. One happy customer brings three new customers to your place. But you’ll lose ten current and/or potential customers once one single person leaves your place in anger.”
You want SL be more successful? Take care of the current residents, and new people will follow the word of mouth.
What s/he said. Promoting secondlife now is way ahead of the game and I’ll add to that promoting secondlife when dissatisfaction is so high it is losing customers at an accelerating rate to the virtual wilderness is way, way ahead of the game.
On the other points made, something doesn’t sit right about user conversations and interactions with friends being considered *content* rather than part of your experience. I wouldn’t want to think actual user conversations start to become a selling point.
Literally selling player content is a choice by the people who make it. It is not part of the secondlife business model and never was except in the sense that the product allows people to make things and if users want to leave their masterpiece or someone else’s standing around they have to rent some space directly or indirectly through a premium account, to hold it.
People can socialize and communicate anywhere. If they do it in secondlife it is because they are comfortable with the tools, the way they appear and their environment. People less satisfied with the tools, environment, policies, costs, etc. and not bound by their avatar or just plain habit, go communicate and socialize somewhere else. That is the danger from a company’s point of view in confusing what people experience with the product with what it is you are actually selling.
It was disconcerting to see that there was almost no sign of virtual worlds in the 1.5 million square feet of CES exhibition space, outside of Avatar Kinect. As someone who is immersed in virtual world SocNet/Blog/RSS circles, I guess I had an exaggerated picture of the level of interest from the mainstream tech world.
So although I agree with you that open worlds like Second Life offer working prototypes of possible futures, I think that to get beyond that phase it will need some yet-unseen way to mesh with the pervasively networked and seamlessly integrated techno-mainstream.
That said, I think that the ennui many of us have experienced in the last year or two in relationship to our second lives, is more due to our own lack of imagination than any action or inaction by Linden Lab. Maybe it’s the “honeymoon is over” phase. Perhaps its our bumping against the inherent constraints of pseudonymous identity. Could be that we’re figuring out that the hyper-consumerism that fuels 10,000 inventory items isn’t a path to happiness. Beats me!
Loved your post! Glad you’re back actively blogging.
thank you for stating that a new take on the old won’t yield new results and for pointing to retention
the management at LL has been so inept that despite so many poor decisions, they still have grown into a nice small business (SBA def: <500 peeps)
imagine what would have happened with just a slight change in that? i don't think it would have been another facebook, but maybe at least a Farmville!
focusing on things like mesh is cool, but certainly not the most important thing. again i point to Farmville which looks just like Habbo Hotel did in 1999
i don't see Second Life ever getting a second wind because the media's "been there and done that" but maybe a gaming perspective and collecting Purple Shields and smurf berries so you can plow your fields will breathe a bit more into it
as always, nicely written Dusan =)
My main question these days is this, can Second Life expand and grow, while still being named Second Life? My point of concern here is that the name Second Life has already been tarnished and labeled, not to mention seems kind of derogatory. “Oh well Second Life is for those with no first life” Now obviously we know people who say these kind of things are out of touch and don’t know what is really going on in Second Life and the possibilities, but this is a real question here. I can’t help but wonder if Second Life was re-branded with a different name, would it attract more people these days?
But everything you mentioned is spot on. If they made it easy for the current users and customers to get other people in, they would never need to market. Allow me to make my own web site, with my own sign up portal that takes people straight to my location, and these users would be signed up for Second Life without almost knowing they are using Second Life. Then these customers who have users coming in through their website portal into their sim and their land, would then market and the Lab would not NEED to do any of that.
Also as an add on to your keep your current customers happy theme, the Lab needs to stop milking its customers every turn. All right you want to charge me 295 a month per sim, do I really need to pay premium membership on top of that? Seems redundant. At every corner and every turn they are taking money off marketplace sales, classifieds everything you name it. How can there be any room for the economy when everyone is busy working to pay off the Lab.
I love your musings, Dusan, but even better I love reading the comments from all the digital personalities, both well-known and new, that your words provoke.
While reading all of the above it occurred to me, don’t most virtuality addicts have passion? In particular, a passionate love/hate relationship with Second Life®? I certainly do; I love the diversity, the creativity / ability to create, the graphic art, the enormity, and the never-ending discoveries possible in SL, while hating all the usual-mentioned things (search, groups, etc., etc.).
But most importantly I hate the enormous cost of “living” there. I am all for paying for things of value (and personally am against free accounts, etc.) but I’m not all that fond of being gouged at every turn. Ridiculously high land prices, pay to upload, pay to list, pay to sell, ka-ching, ka-ching. Once the novelty wears off and one snaps out of one’s initial reverie all that money flowing out of one’s bank account is an eye-opener. My impression is that the Lab has been funneling all their attention on getting Newbies for this very reason — new people are naïve and still in “wow” mode so they will pay and pay to get this new experience. Eventually they snap out of it and their spending will slow down to a comparitive trickle. Hence, “fresh meat” is needed to exploit.
Now that alternatives (no-matter if crude, as OpenSim is evolving), are far more attractive as residential and social locations, SL no longer needs to be viewed as “it.” Second Life is not where Avatarians exist; we exist on the Internet, and SL is just a place on the Internet, it is not THE place. It makes far more sense to reside on OpenSim where you can satisfy your building urges, create content, sell things, participate in group activities and role playing, and generally get the basic creative and chatting/socializing urges satisfied for FAR FAR less money. For this reason I personally chose to take up residence on SpotON3d because I like their business plan, their customer support, and the fact that free accounts exist but are very limited in what they can do, thereby filtering out a lot of the troublemaking issues that uncontrolled freebieism encourages.
My point is, SL does not need to be where Avatarians have their home base. We can live on another grid far more cheaply, while still enjoying all the attractions of Second Life by simply rezzing there when we want to go “out on the town.” Personally I have dumped many many thousands of US$ into the LL coffers over the years. Now I treat Second Life as vacationland, but when I’m done exploring and partying I go home to SO3D. People don’t have to rage about land prices and other expenses imposed on them, they simply have to realize that the Internet is where they reside and are not limited to any one virtual world.
Wow. Awesome post, just stellar. Tateru mentioned it and I checked it out not even knowing you were citing me (and polished up my off-the-cuff verbal comments wonderfully – thanks for that). This is really a fascinating analysis. So when do we get to do some kind of virtual coffee chat or salon or something? This kind of thoughtful debate is really what we need.
Awwww thanks Tom – you know what a fanboi I am of you.
Virtual coffee soon! Anyone else coming? *glances around the comment thread*
The Tyranny of Virtual Choice…
I’ve come close to being paralysed in supermarkets due to the overwhelming amount of choice on offer. Some people have full blown anxiety attacks. This is a well known phenomenon – increasing amounts of choice are not necessarily a good thing.
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