I woke up dreaming about debates and the difference between tactics and strategy, and how to know whether what someone says is true or not and how many turns of the dial the undecideds made, little squiggly graphs shifting ups and downs depending on whether someone hunches their shoulders the wrong way or looks too professorial or too angry.

See – trying to decide whether Philip Rosedale has a vision for Second Life and virtual worlds is much the same – I mean, sure he has history and a track record and all that, but “the vision thing” is a subjective floaty thing, it all has too do with whether he can “relate” to the common Resident and what kind of mood you’re in because your inventory didn’t load or whatever, but at the end of the day his vision doesn’t matter, we vote with our feet, we either join Second Life and believe in virtual worlds, or we decide to run off and play Spore or dress up our X-Box avatars.

This Monday a bunch of people will try to decode Philip, picking over the transcripts of a lengthy interview he did with Robert Bloomfield (Beyers Sellers in Second Life) and try to keep up with the back chat at Metanomics.

What Philip Sees and What Is
Philip talked about the user experience and the Second Life client. In my last post, I talked about his shifting ‘temporal state’. It’s my theory that Philip sometimes confuses where we are today with what he sees tomorrow. It’s not that he doesn’t know the difference, it’s that he doesn’t always clarify that where we’re going has roots in where we are.

Philip claims that once you overcome the pain of the first few hours of entering and learning about Second Life it’s, well, easier to find a job. In fact, even your grandmother can do it, and she’ll find it far easier than finding a job on the Web.

See, Philip got caught up a bit in his own temporal distortions – either that, or there’s the frightening idea that he actually BELIEVES your grandmother could find a job in Second Life TODAY, and she could do it far easier than popping down to the local Wal*Mart and getting a job as a greeter, or learning how to use Craig’s List. I mean, in his view, he’s saying that stuff is just easier in a virtual world than using Monster.com, or I guess e-Bay if you’re trying to buy or sell something, or maybe Google if you want to find out the definition of “preconditions”.

But I feel generous. I like Philip. There’s stuff in his head, and he built a cool, successful company without a lot of funds, and according to his OWN assessment he’s one of the top 10 innovators in the world without question, he’s a God of coding innovation.

So I figure what Philip MEANT was that some day, in the future, we’ll get adapted and oriented to virtual worlds and because there will be so much stuff happening there, and so many companies, and because it “feels more real” it will feel more intuitive.

Until then, we have what we have, and that includes the interface, and how you access Second Life, which brings us head-to-head with that gnawing question of the browser.

Lively is the End of the Beginning not the Beginning of the End
When Google launched Lively it set off a debate about whether it was a killer app – or at least an alpha version of a killer, because it was embedded in the browser and you could throw it up on the sidebar of your blog, and it was easy to use and it was bright and shiny.

Philip stumbled around the question of why Second Life was better than Lively by saying that it’s more like Warcraft. But since then, the Lindens got their talking points down a little more succinctly, I suppose, but I still feel it’s a bit like claiming “Lively doesn’t understand” or “you’re too naive” or “you just don’t have the experience” but it’s kind of like proving the negative. I guess it’s on the theory that you go after the competition’s record, calling it all lies, damn lies and statistics and hope people don’t question what a truth is, as in Philip’s Metanomics interview:

“Well, the Lively client is about the same size as the Second Life client. There’s a nice step there where there’s a little downloader (and I think that’s something we should probably do as well) that downloads the actual client in the background. But if you actually watch that process, it’s about the same size. You’re on broadband so you probably don’t notice, but you’re actually downloading about the same amount of software. It’s a comparably sized client.”

Having poked at the idea that Lively isn’t as “small” as everyone makes it out to be, Philip emphasizes that Google’s Lively isn’t the beginning of the end, it’s the end of the, um, beginning:

I don’t believe that Lively or any other virtual world product is onboarding people particularly faster than Second Life. In some sense, I wish it were true because I think it would again give us all more grist for the mill. But I think when you examine the actual statistics of use you’ll see that there’s still a daunting challenge in getting people into these worlds.

“I think every experiment, like a Lively, every new product that tries to do anything in this category is going to teach us all something. I mean I think there are going to be UI innovations that will be discovered by Lively having taken a different development path, done this all with a different set of intentions that we’re all going to benefit from. Paradigms for navigation or whatever. I’ve seen rich discussion around how you walk around in Lively versus how you walk around in Second Life.”

There’s something about the word onboarding that bugs me – kind of like “Use Cases”. It’s one of those geeky Silicon Valley coder type terms, so I turn my dial a little to the side of “too professorial and aloof” but whatever, I’ll let it pass, because what Philip’s saying is that Lively is cute, and it can teach us something, but that doesn’t make it fit to lead, I guess.

The User Interface Challenge and Small Bets
Philip is on firmer ground when he talks about the Second Life interface. Basically, he concedes that the challenge of the UI for virtual worlds is, well, really challenging:

“[A] couple of years ago everybody was sort of saying, “Well, Second Life, the interface just needs to be made better, and it’s very easy to make the interface better and, well, those Second Life guys are a bit more infrastructure than they are UI and people are going to come out and then really innovate on this UI.” Well, you look at the UIs today, they’re not significantly better. It’s a very hard problem. You can look at any generalized virtual environment product, and it’s got the same challenges in usability that Second Life has. Everybody’s got the same problems. So it’s a hard problem, but once you get over the hump, once you actually figure out how to use a virtual world, I believe that the ease with which you can do new and different things in the world that are of utility to you is much better than the web.”

And against this context, Philip rightly points out that it’s not just the interface that matters – it’s ALL of the stuff around that first hour, or first six hours – all those things that stand between your grandmother and getting her a job. And on this, he seems to be conceding that the Linden’s current approach seems to have shifted into a “small bets, small wins” mind-set, looking back on past failures as an example of, at the very least, a lack of hubris:

I think back on some of my own goofiest feature ideas. Well, I think, for example, this problem of improving the orientation experience; we’ve had a lot of blind alleys on that. There have been a lot of experiments where we’ve tried to improve the new user experience, and we’ve just backed out of it. We had a more sophisticated orientation island that we’ve taken mostly or completely out of circulation now. We put a bunch of time into developing the content experience in the HUD and the different elements of that sort of new user island experience. In retrospect, with the statistics at hand, it doesn’t seem to have helped people very much get started in Second Life. So we just backed out of that because it simplifies the experience a bit to not have that system there.

So I think of trying to improve the conversion behavior, the usability, the UI. We went back to allowing people to use the old UI as the default, with the Dazzle UI (as an option?), although in that case we didn’t lose work because all the foundational work and the option of using that new scheme is there, so we didn’t actually back up and lose anything. That’s a case where we just try different experiments, and some things resolve and are harder hitting than others. What else? There have been lots of smaller features. I remember there was a feature called ‘Talk To’ that was kind of a substitute for Instant Messaging. It was actually my design. I loved it. It just didn’t work. We actually took it out; it was so unused that we ultimately just shut it off so there would be less ‘stuff’ in the UI.

The Big Picture
Now – it’s a bit unfair of me to slice and dice Philip’s comments based on one section of the interview. In fact, he touched on some of the deeper issues, circled towards the heart of the Second Life value proposition in his lengthy discussion.

But even when he’s talking about the broader implications of virtual worlds versus “browser-based chat spaces” Philip never entirely closes the sale. Maybe he’s too caught up in the policy details. Nic Matham at KZero covers this section of Philip’s interview:

“I think there are a lot of different use cases for virtual worlds, but the most generalized form of virtual world, and I’m certain this is the case, that has real meaning for the future is the one in which there is a general capability presented to the end user to create complex content. And then I think there’s a secondary requirement which is that there’s some way for everyone in the environment to get access to and exchange that content, potentially for money. So I think that the general ability to create scripted, interactive, complex objects and the presence of an economy and a permission system in which people can exchange that content is absolutely the bright line that divides Second Life and a very few other systems from everything else. I think that you absolutely have to have those capabilities to be building something that is the sort of future that I’m concerned with and that I talk about.”

Maybe I’m not geeky enough. It’s just that somehow words like “capability”, “requirements” and “use cases” doesn’t remind me of the beacon of hope, or the light on the hill, or whatever it is we came and stayed for.