Blogging the SLCC: Philip Rosedale's Keynote

We’re blogging straight from the Second Life Community Convention at the Michigan Avenue Hilton Hotel in Chicago. We’re next door to Chicago's ESPN fantasy football draft, who already have an open bar going, and surrounded by triathletes. But everyone here is excited for Philip Rosedale, who’s just now taking the stage to shed light on Linden's plans to move away from being a Lab, but also to apologize. “We’re not actively screwing things up as much as you may think,” said Rosedale.

I want to talk a little bit and then take some questions. We did that two years ago in for the first time a couple years ago, and I was able to just sit and have a conversation. And I’d like to do that again.  

Let me just start for everybody with addressing what’s probably on everybody’s mind. Let me start with an apology. [opens jacket to display “Missing Image” shirt.] That’s me in your way. That’s us as a company in the way of everybody manufacturing a future. WE shouldn’t be the most visible part of what’s happening here. And lately we’re more visible because of all the problems. One of our board members said that if you’re the sort of company like Second Life is where you’re building a lot of things, you just need to stay out of the way.  

To that point, I wanted to talk a little bit about how we’re doing and what we’re going to do going forward to get better.

[displays graph]

Look at this internal graph. This is an internal graph we can use to look at service outages, planned or unplanned. Remember this one? All these over here were the VPN failures. If you look at our overall service performance lately, we’re somewhere above 90% availability. There’s a lot of room for improvement here. As someone once quoted, “Well, that’s one 9.”  

So why is it that we’re like that. You’re going to meet a lot of Lindens here. When you meet all of us and talk to us, I hope you’ll be struck by the thought that we don’t lack passion about Second Life. This is our childhood dream. I’m not going to waste everybody’s time talking about the big picture, because you know it. But why is it as a company that the system is down? Why don’t we do it the way that people exhort us to and focus on the customer and stability?

I think as a company we’re at a transition point. Part of that is the size of the room, the number of people building, and so on. We’re at a very interesting point here. The company that built Second is called Linden Lab. And on a bad day, you might feel like the subjects of the lab. Labs are organizations that have a vision about what can make the world better and then will try them out on people, unsuspecting or not, to try and make it happen. 

Here’s the point. Second Life is exceedingly complicated, and it’s a dream that people have tried to make happen for years and many of them have failed to achieve the critical mass and spark that we have now. We got there now because we were a Lab. We were a small group of people willing to work very fast with little concern for the troubles people would face using it.

If we’d had the traditional model of seeking feedback and looking at what works and didn’t, I could say as an entrepreneur that starting in 1999, we wouldn’t be here. To raise 20 million dollars and back the idea of what Second Life was in 2002 or 2003 was very hard. If we as an operating company had been a methodical, careful company and pursued things to the largest step the way we do now, we wouldn’t have made it. 

Happily now, Second Life has been proven to exist. If we disappeared tomorrow, the grid would be rebuilt by you. That was not true a year or two ago. It wouldn’t have had the critical mass to sustain itself.

I think we can stop being a Lab. And I think the message from the community is that we should. I’m the CEO, so I want to lead us that way. But I don’t want to waste time with specific promises. I just want to say that we hear you.  

[slide of crash breakdown]

One of the things we can do to start improving quality is publishing our internal metrics the same way we’ve been pushing economic metrics out there. This line [of stability] has been fairly flat since March. We’d like to have it go down, but it’s also stable. You can’t pick out the big releases that some people think are causing problems. We’re not actively screwing things up as much as you may think. By tracking and getting very serious about inventory loss, and there’s 20 different equally weighted ways to lose inventory, we can do better.

There’s a survey asking if Second Life is getting worse or better. And it’s actually weighted against us a bit since it comes up with the launch screen. It’s weighted toward the people who crash a lot. I kind of like that, just stew in the misery. This screen [output of survey] is in our lunch room. We can see it all the time. 

We also track the rate of the sims. [screen of sims FPS] We actually have more variance there.

Brief update on voice. About a third of the online grid is talking. [Slide says 230,000 residents using voice, peak concurrency of 13,000 at the same time.] Not everyone is using it, and that’s great. This is a feature that by not deploying it we would cause to not happen. It would happen through skype or team speak. It’s just happening better. I think about 20-30% of the islands and estates have it turned off. That’s the sort of dynamic balance we should strike.

[Slide on communities. Secondlife.com currently sends 40% registrations to other communities] We’ve got people coming in from all over the world, 70% and the trend is accelerating, are from outside the US. We’re also having high school teachers come in who aren’t just generally interested in Second Life. What’s the orientation experience that’s best for teachers? We probably don’t know that as well at Linden Lab as others. We’ve started having people send us their resumes or backgrounds who say they have a sign up format that’s targeted at other people. There’s about 40% choosing those other communities. And that’s without turning up the gas.  

The Second Life registration process probably processes about 10,000 people a day. And so we need a lot more people to do this. Some of the more successful ones like Melting Dots in Japan are substantially outperforming, in terms of people staying around months down the line and buying things and so on, our sites. That’s so great. We’re moving a lot of our traffic down that way. Second Life can really be mature when we’re not doing all the registration.

How many people here remember the newbie corral? There was a time when the newbies would fall from the sky, and we built a little corral for them. And the other users would just sit on a fence, like ropers, watching them. We’d see the new entrances displayed in the office and go, “Oh. A newbie!” and then people would just descend on them. 

We haven’t tipped yet. Everyone is always jumping ahead and eager to say that the future has arrived. We’ve built the metaverse, and we’re all going to walk in and disappear. We’re still building it. I think some of you here, and even I, don’t appreciate how big these things can get. I worry about crashes and revenue with my head in my hands, and I don’t remember how big these things can get. We’re just the first people to the party. This is an incredibly small phenomenon right now. This is something everybody on the earth is going to use.
This is bigger than the Web. That’s a bold statement. How can I defend the statement that what we’re all working on is going to be bigger than the Web. Two pictures. When the Internet started, we all imagined that it was going to make the world very small, very fast. And it has. But one of the reasons Second Life is going to be bigger? I have only been to Tokyo once. And in all the time since then, around 1999, I have visited sites and learned about Japanexactly once. The Web is a hyperlinked geography. The way you learn about thigns is clicking on text. The way you learn about what’s going on in Japan is reading Japanese. And you need to be very literate.

And a lot of people don’t. A lot of people aren’t reaching out to each other because of this requirement to read text. As hard as Second Life is, and it is, we’re frustrated, but once you get past the UI, the experience of learning about Tokyo can look like this. [screen of Tokyo in SL].

When you explore another culture in SL, you get to explore it using a geography and topology that you grew up with. No one on the Web, no matter how illiterate, understands it. Want to know more? Walk forward. And the best part, that you don’t see in this picture, is there will be other people there.  

In Second Life, you just go up and talk to someone. If you want a job, you just ask someone. I really believe the one thread that I see a lot of lately is that the rapid growth outside the US is confirming a lot of things. The fact that SL is so flat and globalizing is going to be a huge change agent. Globalization involves fees and tariffs and taxes. None of that is going on here. That’s going to be part of the pressure that’s going to drive an enormous amount of interest.

That’s the thing I find most exciting. And looking at the audience, it’s no surprise. The people coming up with the brightest eyes are the ones from far away where the technologies are being most legeraged. I don’t know when SL will take off, but I solidly believe that this metaphor for the Web will be the dominant one.  

Q&A:

Q: You talk about downtime, to be a global business, you have to be up 24/7. There can’t be scheduled maintenance.

A: You’re right. We can’t have scheduled downtime. And SL has to become loosely coupled. The Web doesn’t go down for an upgrade on Wednesdays. The important thing is that it’s not possible to build a Web that can go down. Last week’s release allowed for multiple versions of servers to run at the same time on the grid. You’re going to see us start releasing risky upgrades on multiple servers. Different people can run different instances of servers.

Q: I’ve been working on something like this a long time. It seems like SL’s blind spot might be the small island problem. I’m thinking about the larger metaverse and standards for interaction and moving back and forth. And in terms of your

Tokyo

thing. I’m thinking that multicultural means multi lingual. What about translation? And then rapid deploymernt needs scale. Are you thinking about opening up? 

A:We need to open the format for exporting standards. We need to open the money system so that if there’s desire to do exchanges between worlds, we could do that. We believe that all the file standards and protocols for any virtual world will have to be open in the same way that everything on the Web has been. It only succeeds so far as it is open to scrutiny.

In the nearer term, I think we can begin to open that. The other big thing on the horizon is open sourcing the servers. Once we have that, we have a lean open way for people to scrutinize.   

We have not taken all the steps we need to. Even small steps like the open source viewer have shown surprising amounts of improvement. We put about a patch a day in from the open source. That’s an impressive level of participation. I agree that language localization and translation needs to be opened up to be facile.

Q: Prok: A lot of the people outside of SL judge it by how it influences first life. What do you think SL’s greatest influence is now. And fast forwarding to the future, what do you think it will be then.

A:That’s a big enough question that I obviously can’t say perfectly that I know. Fundamentally, for me as a creative engineering kid growing up, the most powerful use of technology was to create this super kind of lego kit. To remodel this world and make it better for other people.That was the genesis energy for me. I wanted to build it and ghang around in the ethereal space of a world you could make better.

We discovered along the way that people’s ability to do better empowered them in ways that I did not have a natural understanding of. Right now I think the shrinking of the communication sphere is one of our biggest influences. And then the other is the entrepreneurial early phase. SL is still very early and small. The thing that makes it grow is the success of individuals in two ways. Being able to find and connect to eachother and those individuals who are able to work together. There are about 1000 people who make $1000 or more each month. That’s critical mass. That’s the real-life impact we’re having today. WE’re creating jobs and opportunities at a small scale, but at a scale that’s large enough to be irreversible.

I think 10 years down the line is when we start to see Second Life taking away time and energy from the real world. But we can’t be there now.

Q: I was wondering about your last comment in SL becoming bigger than the Web. The Web is very fast. SL is fascinating, but ti doesn’t have the immediacy of the Web. What are your visions for making SL as point and click and immediate as the Web?

A: How does it go from being very immersive but somewhat clumsy. Ajax Life is a great example. It’s an open source project that gives you a thin layer of applications. I talked earlier about Web services. We want to expose enough so that you can choose the immersiveness level appropriate to what time and activity you have to invest at the moment. That’s part of us moving away from being a Lab and into an OS. We need a great Google Map. Search itself is a major project, and you will see examples of that soon.

Joey Seiler
www.VirtualWorldsNews.com
joey (at) showinitiative.com
(512) 535-8650
skype: joey.seiler.vwnews

Comments

[Nobody Fugazi]

Good notes on globalization, thanks.

Who were the other people who asked questions?

[Joey Seiler]

Hi Nobody,

I was typing as quickly as I could, so throughout the conference I was just able to get down the names of people that I've spoken to before or remembered from other discussions. I'm sorry to everyone whose names I didn't catch.

[Caliope Voss]

thanks for the transcript