Challenges for Any New Linden Lab CEO
So, Philip Rosedale has been kicked upstairs to the Chairman of the Board position of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life, replacing Mitch Kapor as the COB, who will remain as board member. Philip will also work on product strategy, something I think he’s going to love–being able to spend most his time making SL better, rather than much of his time running a company.
Having had the pleasure of walking around Austin one night interviewing Philip before the meteoric rise of Second Life two years ago, I can’t help pass up this great opportunity for a little armchair quarterbacking.
This is a typical move for a founding CEO, meaning:
- Philip no longer has day to day control over operations because the next task, scaling, doesn’t play to his strengths.
- the board feels the company needs to go beyond the startup stage
- despite protestations to the contrary by the board, I bet investors are looking for an exit; I’d bet on an IPO as opposed to a buyout, if LL’s stated goal of being the technology that runs the 3D internet is to be believed. Or, here’s a unique twist. If neither of those occur within 3 years, the CEO may be able keep the investors at bay by giving back profits, much like a public company does when they issue dividends.
If you believe the Gartner Hype Cycle, then I think we’re in the “Trough of Dissillusionment” for Second Life in particular and the Metaverse in general. Second Life has been pummled in the press since last summer and the rest of the Metaverse platform companies and developers have felt the mud splatting on them, too. The good news is that before us lies the “Slope of Enlightment” where people get real work done. One of those people will be the new Linden Lab CEO, who will be responsible for scaling both the organization and the architecture.
So, here are a few predictions on what the new CEO will do. Wish I had inside knowledge, but I don’t. These predictions are based upon observations from publicly available articles and my own experience in SL leading a team of developers.
The new LL CEO will:
Create a culture for producing professional grade, workable technology.
While the existing Linden Scripting Language is good for rapid prototyping, it’s poorly designed and materially hampers any robust programs in SL, especially those that would support commerce. Without a robust programming language, SL will stagnate.
Develop an infrastructure that works and upon which developers, content creators, and businesses can rely.
The situation is bad now, simple things don’t work reliably, like delivering an object for which someone’s paid. It’s so bad, Timeless Prototype has created a Virtual Distribution Channel because the native llScript() one is unreliable. The infrastructure should just work, freeing developers so that they can create new things, not recreate broken ones.
Make the technology more open.
I’m not talking in an open source sense, I’m talking more in the sense of giving developers more ways to communicate with SL from outside the world so that they can develop Facebook Widgets, web apps, etc. the run on the web, but pull data from the world. The reason the Web works so well is that every website can interoperate with every other website using simple HTML tags. The metaverse needs that same ability to exchange information easily within the world and without the world.
Look, the only reason we’re talking about Facebook now is because they released a robust API last summer that allows anyone to create Facebook apps and mashups. No one seems to remember a few years back when we were all questioning Facebook’s viability. Now it’s the big, mashable dog on the block. LL needs to do the same to assure the robustness, viability, and survivability of Second Life.
Provide technology roadmaps so developers can plan ahead.
LL is tight-lipped about future technology plans. As a developer, it’s always a mistake to plan on features before they are actually released. LL needs to develop a stronger developer program that provides developers insight into future directions. For example, we all know LL has been working on a revamping of the system architecture for 18-24 months now, they’re even calling it the Second Life Grid. We just don’t know the specifics.
Most technology companies–and remember, LL has stated they want to be a platform company–provide technology roadmaps so developers know where they’re headed. Currently, developers simply cannot plan because they’re left in the dark until functionality appears on the beta grid.
I know why LL keeps everyone in the dark. They want to be free to make changes based upon their priorities, but they really do need to communicate better with their developers if they want a robust development community. The current Second Life Grid simply aggregates existing information for a developer audience. That’s nice, but it’s far, far, far from enough. LL needs to treat their development community better by providing better information concerning technology. They need a Channel 9, a Robert Scoble when he was Microsoft, a developer evangelist with the openeness needed for developers to move confidently forward with Second Life.
Generate sponsorship/advertising revenue
If increasing revenue beyond LL’s traditional business model(s) is an imperitive, then I think you’re going to see LL begin acting a bit more like a content publisher, meaning, the new CEO will begin cutting sponsorship deals with large brands, something LL has been loath to do. I don’t think you’re going to see ad boards from Linden Lab everywhere, but I do think you’ll see more ways they can generate media revenue. Some ideas include: an in-world job board, more robust classifieds, keyword buys and probably sponsorships, but not necessarily in-world. If they don’t, everyone else will and the CEO may not like revenue dollars bypassing Linden Lab and going to big media companies.
If you think big media companies aren’t taking notice about the ad revenue potential in SL in particular and the Metaverse in general, then you’re not paying attention. If big media companies are hanging back now, they won’t if the new CEO is successful in growing the user base. The CEO will then ask him or herself, “Why should I let all that revenue go to the other guys? We can compete with them.” Maybe LL will create their own shopping mall/portal, or their own channel in much the same way Macromedia did in the late ’90′s when they created Shockwave.com to highlight their new web-based Shockwave technology for Director, ending up creating a media channel that lived beyond it’s initial dreams and being sold to Viacom two years ago. LL can do the same.
Make changes to the existing business model that facilitates LL wanting to be a “platform” company.
I think this is tricky as long as they keep the server side proprietary. For example, who makes money from HTML? I don’t mean the developers who use it, but the people who define it. No one has to pay anything to us it. The only people I can think of that make money are membership organizations like the W3C or maybe ISO that are membership organizations that exist to create standards. Many successful platforms are open source (eg: Apache), it seems that’s the way LL should go that way, too, if they want to be the platform company that powers the 3D internet.
The problem for the new CEO is that LL is more than a platform company. Because of the community, they’re also dragged unwillingly into messy governance issues, of which some users have made a career out of complaining. Which brings us to…
Solve the governance problem one way or another.
While the Linden’s Laissez-Faire style should work according to Kurt Lewin’s social psychology theories, LL really doesn’t want to be in the governance business. Yet, the conundrum is that they see the value in the engaged community. The new CEO will have to make a decision one way or another: either, put participatory governance in place, or cede it to the community once and for all and be subordinate to their wishes. This is a messy, time consuming problem, but one that needs to be resolved.
Strengthen rules concerning the economy
While I don’t think the new CEO will hire a particular former Fed chairman to help set economic policy, he might. But the economy is the big shiny thing about Second Life and a very few people are making serious money. The problem is that as the user base grows, so does the economy. I don’t know exactly what the issues will be, but I know they’ll have to do with keeping inflation in check, figuring out a way to allow other entities to convert Lindens to hard currency and back, etc. In other words, the new CEO will need to facilitate transactions for those that seriously approach Second Life to make money, while not complicating things too much for the vast majority of casual users who just want to spend a few Lindens on that cute new outfit from Simone’s.
Those are a few thoughts on the new LL CEO, whoever he or she may be. Life will be different in the next phase of Linden Lab and Second Life. That’s what I think, anyway. What do you think?
Joel, essentially, I hear you saying you’re for creating a developer’s FIC — and they already have it. They have all the groups, wikis, JIRAs, internal mailing lists, special SL Views you could wish for. If you want to friend a Linden, go on Facebook, they friend even griefers. You could go to all the office meetings with Zero Linden and all the rest.
But, I think quite possibly, they don’t have the strategic plan you wish for simply because they aren’t organized. They react to outside pressures erratically, they stumble, they are in crisis mode. They have two very hobbling ideological fixtures they can’t let go: 1) that the grid all has to be connected, and that several grids can’t come into being not connected to each other (Philip mission statement is about “connecting us all to Second Life” not “enabling anybody to use SL in their basement or school or multinational corporation as they wish” 2) that newfangled ideas like the Love Machine and distributed decision-making are positive, successful, and required for this product. Maybe they are; it would be fun if they were. But the love-patting and free-lancing at this point is in overdrive, and there just isn’t enough focused, grown-up, sustained attention on various tasks. The new CEO has to wean them away from these 2 ideological hobbles, not destroy, but wean.
You get a taste of what is possible when you see Sidewinder Linden, one of the grown-ups, just decide that he has to get Havoc 4 done, and that’s it, and he grinds away on it like a trooper, reporting on his work openly on the blog, revising, fixing, explaining, and staying on task. Others are not like that. Where are all the people like James or Hamilton who worked on Search? In the code cave?
The absence of feedback is annoying, but to keep the community in the loop, they’d have to have a whole other layer of Tiggers, people like the TSO’s Tigger who runs interference from game devs and then gets squeezed between the aspirations of the fans and the limitations of the devs. But if we are to be prosumers, they have to bring us on board. And by us, I don’t mean *just you* I mean all of us in business or consuming, for that matter. A collective resident seat on the board. A plan for tier-payers’ to open stock options when LL IPOs. These are the minimum.
Second Life needs ad boards, but not networked advertising that you pay adfarmers to blight and devalue our land with. It needs the boards in the welcome areas, orientation islands, etc. They need to be normal purchasable ad space with both notecard and inventory givers enabled and portals/teleports/landmarks enabled so that they serve as openings and connectings to this really closed and atomized society.
The governance issue simply cannot be solved by Mickey Mouse placebo effects like “let’s have a wonky silly interface called the JIRA for people to write their frustrated bug hunt reports on” or “let’s have abuse reports go to island owners for some offenses”. Governance means real power sharing. It means a seat on the board and stock options. And at the very least, it means a three-person ombudsmen team made up of one Linden, one resident leader, and one outsider like a Raph Koster type who cares about these issues (he wouldn’t have time, but like him). These three should rotate, and resolve some of the clear-cut cases of governance where all other remedies have been exhausted, i.e. how to address the prosecution of ad farmers, island fraudsters etc but also take up issues like “what happens to our stuff when they open-source?”. When LL comes up with remedies, like the new ad farm policy or the new safety island transfer, they need to do this *with* residents, putting them in the loop and letting them help shape the policies.
It’s more than fine to make a career out of complaining, Joel. You don’t get to dis complainers in that facile fashion. Who are you? We live here. We work here. We pay for it. You are using SL for your metaversal consulting business. I serve people inworld. Why should you get to shape Linden policy but not me?
There isn’t a way to facilitate micro=transactions unless you convince Mastercard or Visa to accept them, and that would likely be too costly, and there is a reason for the micropayment curerncy to go on being the Linden. The Lindens should stop printing Lindens to sell on the LindEx, and instead, consult with economists and see if it would make sense to raise the stipend with printed Lindens going inside premium accounts, and adding content to make the premium accounts attractive.
Your idea about the shopping mall/portal/channel seems odd. All of Second Life *itself* is a big shopping mall/portal/channel with spinoffs like Slexchange.com or Onrez.com Yes, corporations should be smarter about advertising and creating content to be sold through those channels, and working with inworld businesses to rent space and showcase their logo and wares and information. This seems like straining gnats through a sieve now, but eventually these companes will understand that they reach larger audiences in virtuality by working with community virtual businesses, not merely by trying to virtualize themselves in awkward ways.
I don’t think the new CEO should be making bold steps that are made on the backs of residents. That means no new tier hikes — such as we saw with the entry of John Zdanowski. Squeezing of profit should happen by tightening up staff and labour discipline and cutting travel and looking for new investors, not grabbing it sim by sim from residents who already give at the office.
The new CEO should also avoid making some bold brassy plan like selling big sponsorships that will alienate the blogosphere and some inworld — and with Philip always claiming the corporations would stay on their islands, and with Philip still in the loop, that might be hard to do. A better plan would be to facilitate sponsorship of live music, events, venues, clubs, etc. — this is just never happening, and no one can understand why.
As for Facebook being the big mashable dog on the block, that will fade. You may be thrilled as a developer to have access to all these potential advertising dollars through APIs, but we as users are absolutely saturated and weary of APIs and new widget after new widget force-friending 20 friends. People are backing out of Facebook and going over to newer less clutted and agitating spaces like Friendfeed, which has the micronews feed of Facebook, without the stupid.
So, what then does the new CEO need to do? To recap and add some obvious things:
1. Advertise SL in magazines and on TV and popular fashion/shopping/music sites, it’s time. They feared doing this in the past, but now with subs slacking off they need to do at least a test campaign.
2. Stop SL Views and take the budget and put it into staff development and have one small staff team hold bunches and bunches of inworld, dog-food-eating focus groups for 50 minutes several times a week on various topics and report in a professional fashion like a real marketing and PR team, outsource this if they don’t know how to do this. The new CEO should be seen as a listener and studier of a world that these Lindens do not live in. They parachute in for office hours — they never fly around, by their own admission.
3. Re-open the forums to robust community participation with return of “Land and Economy” and so on and have a full-time dedicated staff moderator, not volunteer resmods. Make the website a mini-Myspace with avatar profiles able to be uploaded to the servers, and a second life that happens on the web, too, a lite SL where people begin to chat, shop, advertise without actually descending into the world.
4. Suspend Windlight.
5. Open up billboard advertising in common areas and on roadsides — return all prims of all current ad farms and extortionist parcels and outlaw billboarding except by Linden Lab itself, for rent to residents, or on private islands. The Lindens could be making revenue as much as they tier from a sim if they would just get over their allergy to commerce and billboards, which need not be ugly, but can be trees and floors that click and interact, kiosks, pictures, statues, all kinds of things.
6. Create a Linden and resident Social Working Group that takes the business/economy/social/cultural aspect of open-sourcing Second Life as seriously as the code and grid architecture.
I don’t suppose the Lindens will do anything I’ve suggested here — I know them too well. The awful thing is, they will do what YOU suggest, and that will decrease community spirit and memberships. But both of us could be kept happy if the Lindens would just get over their ideological sobornost’ and let there be more than one grid and more than one asset server. We would still have MySecondLife.com to keep in touch.
Oh, Prok, get off the Fetid Inner Core (FIC) nonsense already. Everyone can go over to any Linden they like at any conference, office hour, or via email and introduce themselves and strike up a conversation. I know you do it because I’ve seen you talking to them at happy hours like everyone else. Continuing this FIC fiction is a nice way to gain readers by building up a non-existent boogey man. Every 1984 needs its Goldstein.
Puh-lease!
>Joel, essentially, I hear you saying you’re for creating a developer’s FIC — and they already have it.<
Actually, you heard wrong. You are describing the status quo. It’s not working. I’m describing something new. It’s more of a change in attitude than necessarily new communications tools. One example is that they could benefit from a developer evangelist position that makes internal thinking more visible. That’s what Scoble did at Microsoft; he went in with a camera to a programmer’s office and said, “What cool stuff are you working on?” They need to be more communicative about their plans so people can actually, dare I say, plan for their business.
>But if we are to be prosumers, they have to bring us on board. And by us, I don’t mean *just you* I mean all of us in business or consuming, for that matter. A collective resident seat on the board. A plan for tier-payers’ to open stock options when LL IPOs. These are the minimum.<
Hold your gun fire, hotshot. Stop already with the insider insinuations. The “us vs them” thing you do is false.
Give tier-players stock options? As a minimum? I don’t know, sounds kinda self serving to me. I was suggesting a strategic plan with better communications so people outside of LL could plan. As for a collective seat on the board, that may be one direction in governance, but my prediction is that a new CEO will go farther than that, maybe even reversing the roles where the community governs itself and LL has a seat on the community’s board, or in its legislative body. I don’t pretend to know what that’s going to look like, I’m just pointing out that the new CEO is going to have to make a decision one way or the other about governance.
You may be correct about the lack of strategic plan; if they’re an Agile shop, then I could see why they wouldn’t have a strategic plan. One tenet of Agile development is that you shouldn’t put much energy into planning details of future functionality until you’re ready to work on that functionality; experience teaches us that doing so is doomed to failure because you don’t have enough information in the planning phase to plan appropriately. You only get that information once you start solving the problem. While true, one of my issues with Agile development is that that particular tenet seems mutually exclusive to strategic planning. I’m wondering if that’s not the root cause of lack of a roadmap?
>Second Life needs ad boards, but not networked advertising that you pay adfarmers to blight and devalue our land with. It needs the boards in the welcome areas, orientation islands, etc. They need to be normal purchasable ad space with both notecard and inventory givers enabled and portals/teleports/landmarks enabled so that they serve as openings and connectings to this really closed and atomized society.<
Glad that you agree. I was building that before The Sheep pulled the plug. However, I was going to let the publishers decide where they wanted to put the adboard themselves, with terms of service that would prevent egregious, anti-social behavior. I was also going to offer advice on where to put the boards, too. I can tell you, what you describe sounds great and doable with the current technology, but once you dig into it and ad functionality that’s really needed to make that business run and scale, you run smack into the limitations of the LL technology so hard, it forces you to create complicated, convoluted human processes that doom the whole enterprise…which leads to my point that LL need to create an infrastructure that works. Scaling is not just about technology, it’s about robust enough technology that doesn’t force Humans to do repetitive, low value-added tasks.
>I don’t think the new CEO should be making bold steps that are made on the backs of residents.<
I’m saying the CEO needs to develop a whole new set of rules so that the community and the technology can scale. You’re describing problems with the status quo. The status quo doesn’t scale, in my opinion. Spending time in the status quo will lead to failure for the CEO and for LL. They need to do something different in order to create something different: a scaled world and a scaled community, or community of communities.
>You may be thrilled as a developer to have access to all these potential advertising dollars through APIs, but we as users are absolutely saturated and weary of APIs and new widget after new widget force-friending 20 friends. <
Have you not read anything I’ve written? What, out of anything I’ve written, or done, makes you think that I would support spamming? That particular Facebook functionality is broken, socially. Not what I was talking about. You’re missing the forest for the trees. The SL technology needs to interoperate with the web much, much better than it does now so that developers can create things that user’s want.
>The awful thing is, they will do what YOU suggest, and that will decrease community spirit and memberships.<
Need to re-up for that Dale Carneige class, huh? Stop with the ad hominem attacks already.
I have power? I have the same access to the Lindens as you. Probably less at this point in time. The power I have is the power of my ideas. If they feel what I say makes sense, is of benefit to them, and is communicated in a way that shows mutual respect, I may persuade them. But I may not. To suggest anything more is false.
While you bring up many good points and have a few interesting ideas, on the whole, I think your orientation mis-understands what I’m suggesting. I’m not suggesting repairs to the status quo, which I think characterize many of your ideas. I’m suggesting that to get to scale both technologically and community-wise, LL and the new CEO need not be bound by the status quo and it’s underlying rules and assumptions, articulated or not. They need to begin anew in order to come up with new ways of doing things, because a scaled Second Life is going to be different than the SL of today.
I’m sure you know the apocryphal quote attributed to Henry Ford, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, I would have made a better horse.” You’re describing a better horse. I’m saying they need to make a car and an electric one at that, powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, that has a companion electrolyzer that makes hydrogen from water and a solar cell. To do that, they’re going to have use different thinking than what got us where we are now.
Thanks for your thoughts, just stop with the snarky, ad hominem attacks already.
Joel,
You’re calling for an institutionalized FIC, a special developers’ group that is even more special and accessed and superior to the rest of the users, and you tell me to “get off the FIC” thing?! Puleeze.
I never dreamed when I first commented on the *forums privileged* (who I later discovered were exempt from disciplinary action mainly because they had signed NDAs, were needed for press coverage in early days, etc.) that the Lindens would go even further and create the special dev lists, SL Views, Certifieds, Volunteers and Mentors with even more privileges and internal communication lines, Architectural Working Group, and the LDPW, all corporativist elitist classes of people they want to help run the society with them, who have no accountability to us and over whom we have no democratic control. If your response to that is to say, oh, create or die, or oh, go to school and learn to be a programmer or designer, I can only say: you can’t make up a society of people who only went to FIT or MIT, many of whom don’t even pay the bills. Any solution that says “go become a member of those feted groups yourself and shut up” or “these aren’t feted groups they are just skilled and competent groups” hasn’t grappled with the real problems of liberal democracy and due process in this world.
The collective seat on the board would be an acknowledgement that their claims of using revolutionary new methods to make revolutionary new products in fact are dog food that can be eaten, and by them.
Um, why is it self-serving for *you* as a developer to morph Second Life around to what *you* want to happen because you make money *from* the platform and yetcharacterized as “self-serving” for me to ask for a collective tier-payers’ seat for people who *pay tier into Second Life*. The proportion of tier they pay and their profits’ from inworld business is far, far less than what developers pay because many developers don’t even pay tier. Why, there isn’t even a corporate rate for Second Life.
In fact, if the CEO needs to draw revenue from users of SL, rather than once again raise island tier or raise mainland tier, how about raising corporate membership rates?
Your notions of “the community governing itself” are very undeveloped Joel, just like the Lindens’ notions that things like having island owners get abuse reports. Cede *to whom* among the user population, how? Developers?
I don’t care about the vicissitudes of what Agile dictates, software development in its literalist technical sense is not only what their “product” is. They can have plans, and do have at least some plans, for community service, development, staff training, overseas operations, etc. etc. This is where the strategic planning seems weak.
>I was going to let the publishers decide where they wanted to put the adboard themselves, with terms of service that would prevent egregious, anti-social behavior.
As I told you at VW, I don’t feel this is enough at all, and is hugely vulnerable to abuse. It requires customers or viewers near customers to file individual trouble tickets. “Letting people decide” means they will use the existing abusive ad-networks and you will be an outsized outworld corporation artificially sustaining the ad farms right at the point when they’ve been dealth a pretty strong (but not sufficient blow). You could be merely giving them new life.
And I’m willing to bet that your idea of what is abusive doesn’t at all fit with mine and that of other people who are trying to work inworld — I’m quite sure we’ll endlessly disagree that your ad network that you make revenue from is in fact a loss for me if it forces a move-out or a sale of land. These are conflicting interests, and that’s why I think unfortunately, given the Lindens’ inability to zone, that they’ve driven us to only one conclusion: that they have to take over the renting of ad space on roadsides and public areas so that it can be banned on waterfronts and in the middle of forests.
I don’t think you can offer advice where to put the boards in a free market. That’s skewing a free market to your advantage as a giant player who essentially ends the free market. But the free market turns to spam in a setting without Linden zoning. So *unless* the Lindens are willing to zone, and have residential, commercial, educational, and experimental sims with varying degrees of user control and control of buyers over users *on the mainland* you can’t rationally call for ads to be allowed to be put everywhere. They are currently put everywhere, with destructive effect and loss of value and retention everywhere. Unfortunately, because the Lindens won’t zone, the only alternative is to ask them to outlaw all ads expect their own at roadside and public places that they themselves rent out. The small businesses eager to use them in their neighbourhoods will not find putting up ads every 2 weeks, as they used to on every telehub wall, be a low value repetitive task.
It isn’t an “ad hominem” attack to point out the obvious problem here, Joel, and it is being both distractive and thin-skinned to claim that your corporate plan for Second Life that privileges developers and the Second Life Grid concept isn’t divisive and self-serving (if I can simply counter your claim that I’m “self-serving” as a debate, and not call it an “ad hominem attack,” surely you can do the same.)
But such favouritism to the corporate approach *will be* divisive, *already is* divisive and already *doesn’t work* (the corporations go away!). Your airy, dismissive, “Geez, they should either cede governance or end it” is the sort of whopping big difference between your plan and mine, and that’s because you clearly don’t care. It’s no concern of yours what a million blingtards do, if they are dumped off the servers and lose their dress designs in open source, I don’t hear you caring. It really sounds to me like you view this as just another MMORPG or social media with widgets and not anything that both purports to be different and *has been* different. If the Lindens either dump or further control members by handing them over to more restrictive corporations, you seem unconcerned, as your only concern is to scale the platform as a grand edifice.
This idea that you, as a former executive of the Electric Sheep Company, “have less power” is curious, and again, misleading if not false. Huh? The metaversal services agencies have dedicated teams of Lindens that only wait on them. That are turned out to lay on hundreds of sims and keep them functioning for something like CSI:NY. These agencies often sign NDAs and get advance notice of features. They take it for granted that they can pronounce on them and delay or accelerate them. While you, like Lindens, could say, “Well, bring us 30,000 sign-ups in a week, and you, too, get special Linden dedication.” But…we do, collectively bring the sign-ups!. Dreamland and every other rental agency on down, and every content business out there — don’t we retain the customers that you don’t even retain, with a fraction of the outside investment that you’ve had? Hello?
This isn’t some kind of ‘resentment” or “victimology” here, it’s a report: the inworld businesses, which taken together, pay 80 percent of the Lindens’ revenue, are basically handed only the Concierge service, which now at least functions on minimal customer service options faster, as some kind of concession to its power. I mean, at this stage, somebody like me can own more sims than say, an IBM or Cisco, just because those companies are experimenting with rounding errors at this stage.It’s just all out of proportion.
What you — and even the Lindens –fail to see is that this “repairs to the status quo” *is* the revolutionary product — which is in danger of being killed. *You* are the one pumping the status quo that has always been the story of MMORPgs and old media and Hollywood — a small elite of creatives work together with industry leaders and financiers to make mass entertainment or social media that the masses have no say in.
But real social media is disruptive. It’s disruptive of that “scaling” and “mass” stuff first and foremost — and thank God for it! You’re the one saying it’s UNMASSED MEDIA, Joel, and yet you’re hell-bent on “scaling”. The long tail really is a long tail. You don’t have to worry about “scaling” a long tail, Joel, from above, from the top down. It scales all by itself when the conditions of freedom and due process are created.If it doesn’t scale massively and with penetrability so that advertisers can grab at it, too bad, if the bottom-up scalers have found a revenue-generating device for themselves. A nation of long-tail shopkeepers probably may not be very exciting to you, but in fact that would be revolutionary on a global scale.
Making a community of self-sustaining small and medium businesses and their customers may seem like small potatoes and uninteresting to you and you demand gigantism and scale. The world could grow slower and better and retain more people. This isn’t to artificially throttle growth, opr to say OMG nobody can be let into my world of “men in tights,” but it’s not to go at breakneck speed to grab MMORPG-like subscription numbers just to impress the board or the future buyers. It should be impressing people with its GNP, not its users and their hours on line.
You have no plan for scaling the community, Joel, other than to “let publishers decide where their ads go” (worse than the current Linden laissez-faire as it reinforces the ad-farm networks with real money), and to off-handedly tell the Lindens to “decide to cede governance or not” without any coherent plan for how you “cede governance” and with a resolute refusal to understand the problem of the FIC, as if this wasn’t an institutionalized, conscious, manifest feature of Second Life, and is just some tinfoil conspiracy. Don’t you wonder why the creator and seller of Copybot originally winds up being put in the feted Architectural Working Group in its first secret, Linden iteration? Don’t you have to ask why Woodbury goons can not only hack into the Facebook network of the Lindens and pose as Linden employees but get them to friend willingly? Don’t you have to ask why programmers are the only ones who get to decide the future of Second Life just because software is one of its aspects?
A “scaled SL” that is merely a glossier form of Hollywood — an adjunct to TV shows like a website — isn’t anything revolutionary, and likely isn’t anything anybody could justify scaling, and likely wouldn’t scale anyway.
No, I’m describing the car that the Lindens already made, but refuse both to drive, or let be driven — a car that enables everybody else to have a car. You’re merely describing a talking horse, Mr. Ed.
The superior attitude with which you can decide that the Lindens should “cede governance…or not” as if it is merely a subscription list to cut or support or sell lets me know where the snark is. There aren’t any ad hominem attacks here, stop with the complaints.
Prok, when you write, I feel like I’m talking to Alex Jones. Do black helicopters fly outside your window? You live in a world of preconceived notions that do not change with evidence to the contrary. Because of that, I believe it’s more important that you stick to your own narrative than listen to other people. Without listening, there’s no dialogue.
Sad.
Example: I wasn’t talking about scaling as in a broadcast sense. I was talking about physical scaling of the technology, which must occur if there ever is to be a long tail. You’re arguing under the assumption that I meant mass media. I understand it’s your narrative, but it’s still an incorrect assumption. Scale does not need to imply mass media.
The fact is, the current state of SL technology has bugs and poorly chosen design constraints that will prevent anything from scaling. How is it that SL can have only 50-75 avatars attend a concert without lag being a problem, but Multiverse can easily have 10-20 times that? Avatar density needs to be improved. That’s a scaling problem.
Scaling offers many opportunities, some of which will benefit you as a landlord, including more land to rent and more foot traffic, too.
What I’m suggesting is that LL needs to behave in a way that allows the ecosystem of developers to be able to plan, much like every other software company. Call it what you will, but the fact is, people cannot plan today, they can only react. That means MOU, ESC, and you. It’s not about creating an “elite”. It’s about creating the ability to plan so that everyone can move forward with a modicum of certainty. Call it the vision thing from a technological point of view.
As for liberal democracy and due process, you’re looking for the Lindens to be the government. They’re not. They’re a platform company. That’s why I say the new CEO needs to make a decision to be the gov’t or get out of the gov’t business. You’re right, I don’t have plan for that happen. Not my problem to solve. Just pointing out that it needs to be solved.
I say it’s self serving for you to want a seat on the board because you are a landlord. You would benefit from being on the board in the same way that a developer in the real world benefits by being a city council person.
I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say corporations don’t pay. LL is an ISP and we’ve all had to pay for our “space”, ie, land, whether it’s islands or on the mainland. To me, it sounds like a storyline in the FIC narrative. Great to add tension and intrigue, but unrelated to reality.
As for letting publishers decide where to put the ads themselves, I believe it is more democratic because everyone is responsible for their own actions. Call it libertarian, if you will. What your describing is the Lindens create essentially a public utility for advertising. Not that I think it’s necessarily a bad idea, it just seems so contrary to what I think you’ve said you wanted: a government that facilitates society and business, but does not compete with them.
Of course I can offer advice on where to put ads in a free market; to say I can’t is ridiculous. It’s called consulting and happens in business every day. If you truly believe in a free market, then you know that the market forces will punish those people who do things the market doesn’t like. I’d argue that one of the reasons existing in-world ad networks are small, like Mr. Lee’s, is because of their bad behavior. A competitor that comes along that behaves ethically and encourages it’s publishers to do so as well could put folks like Mr. Lee’s out of business.
As for the ad network, yes, I created it to serve paying, real world customers. What you failed to hear, is that I also created it for the in-world brands who were the most important audience. Without making it work for them, there would be no audience and without an audience there would be no RL customers. When big media comes into SL–and they will–they will not care about the in-world brands like I did.
It is an ad hominem attack when your whole argument is predicated on the fact that I’m a fat cat, big media tycoon. You have a narrative that you stick to without listening. That’s a problem.
>This idea that you, as a former executive of the Electric Sheep Company, “have less power” is curious, and again, misleading if not false. Huh? The metaversal services agencies have dedicated teams of Lindens that only wait on them. That are turned out to lay on hundreds of sims and keep them functioning for something like CSI:NY.<
Oh, why do I even waste my time with this? First, you think those hundreds of sims were free? Hardly. Second. I’m no longer with The Sheep, meaning, I don’t have access to concierge services, so, no, I don’t have the access you describe. You have more access than I. Third. I’m not in the Metaverse development business. Other than speaking and writing, I have not done a lick of development in the Metaverse since the Sheep imploded in December. Today, you have more of a direct financial stake in SL than I do.
As for the FIC, you can put me on record as saying that I do, in fact, view it as “just some tinfoil conspiracy.” The FIC is a distraction that prevents you and others from seeing the real problems and coming up with real solutions. Now, it does generate readers, I’ll give you that. But all I had to do is make a phone call to Reuben Steiger a few years ago and I’m now part of the FIC. You can call him, too. Does it make you part of the FIC if you do? Like I said before, every 1984 needs its Goldstein.
As for your criticism about big media coming into SL, bring it up with Sibley Verbeck, Giff Constable, and Valerie Williamson at the next conference happy hour you’ll all be attending. I’m no longer part of the team.
Oh, stop it with the “right-wing baiting”. I am not a born-again creationist conspiracy-mongering SUV-driving Bush voter. I am voting for Obama. Cut it out, please. It’s stupid. I *disagree* with you and *you are not persuading me with your own extremist views which are to the left of my liberal views*. THAT is what is going on here, Joel, and don’t try to characterize it as “me refusing to change my beliefs contrary to the evidence.” Your notion of “listening” and “dialogue” amounts to me rolling over and saying “Wow, geez, I was all wrong and you’re right.”
But you aren’t right, and I continue to provide ample reasons to illustrate that. I don’t expect you to change, roll over, or anything of the sort, nor will I accuse you of “not listening”. You need to learn to accept that there will be political positions in the Metaverse that are not your own, that you will not share, and that you cannot stamp out by merely defaming them as “ad hominem attacks” or “black helicopters”. They’re going to persist; they will grow bigger as more people start paying attention. Are you going to accuse everybody who criticizes virtuality — and lots more are coming! — to be black helicopters?
You do indeed mean mass media if you are talking about more and more customers, which you as an advertiser get to reach through owning a networked advertising system that enables publishers to chose location. What, you’re expecting to reach 47 or 437 people, Joel? Please. All of what is happening with the Sheep or MOU or any of these corporations is figuring out how to massify the advertising. There’s nothing wrong with that. Just don’t pretend it isn’t about mass media.
Unless I hear you having some theory about reaching urban educated elites as cultural influencers or something like that, I have to conclude that your notion of these worlds scaling is basically just a newfangled idea of making mass media more interactive and adaptive to niches, but that ultimately, puts the coders and their corporate sponsors in the driver’s seat, enabling them to preside over the massness that the individual niches will not sense as they will not seek to talk to each other.
It has never bothered me that there can only be 40 or 80 avatars on a sim. What is it you want to do with people, Joel? I don’t want to be in a football stadium watching television, which is what happens by the time you get to 400 avatars staring at a slickly produced video with 3 talking heads on it with RL credentials. The only place the long tail lashes there is in a bit of backchat. I’m not sure how Multiverse is claiming to do this, but sometimes with other platforms it’s merely a kind of trick, that they are able to copy instances and have people in separate cafes but all tuned in to one shoutcast server or some other server in which they can listen to the performer, and talk to each other just in that instance/on that sim, but not be with the 500 or 5,000 people interactive all at once. I really want to hear you drill on that. Can these other platforms that put 5,000 or even 500 people “on one server” all at once or all “attending a concert all at once” enable them to interact *with each other”?
You know where you can talk to 7,000 people all at once, interact with any one of them all at once, push text and inventory (objects) to them all at once? Second Life, Concierge Party Group. God bless those Lindens, you can even vote on a proposition. I’m just curious: tell me another thing on the Internet that does that. The Lindens don’t even appreciate what they’ve done with that. I’m not saying SL does this well; it lags, it’s error-prone — a group of 700 is really more like the maximum of an effective working simultaneous group if all are logged on, etc. But seriously, rather than boast about massness here (you’re supposed to be unmassed) please explain what it is that you want people *to do* when you have them “all together”. I want them to talk and listen in smaller groups that have some meaning and substance, not stare open-mouthed up at a screen or a prefabricated entertainer. There are two real-life constraints here that don’t scale: the 60-hour minute, and the ability of only 20 people to talk each for 3 minutes in that 60-hour minute. That suggests the size of the group might be dictated for everybody. Even expanding it with multi-tasking backchat, video, visually animated objects, group chat, IM chat, etc, well there’s a limit to human attention.
I really find it offensive when people assume that I make my critique of Linden Lab or developers around Linden Lab “because I’m a landlord that has to make a greedy living off grubbing land.” That’s definitely what you imply when you say patronizingly “Oh, Prok, you, too, will benefit from scale and foot traffic.”
This is so *primitive* Joel. You should know better than that: I care about every aspect of the society, not just my little business; my little business is merely an attempt to understand how the thing can work, or scale or not scale. Duh, I realize that if you add more subscriptions you add more revenue for landlords. It’s been an enormously exciting thing to see that there are HUNDREDS of rental agents like me that you never read about or hear from who even have more land than me who live and thrive in SL in spite of everything, and there are more than enough customers for all.
But, you have to ask whether the breakneck speed of flushing in large constituencies (let’s add this foreign market, let’s grab that social network like the Suicide Girls and jam it into SL) even works. Or CSI:NY. Let’s try to jam as many people on the servers as we can possibly jam. Do they stick? They don’t. Is that LL’s fault for having a wonky interface, insolent coders who think everyone should learn to build or script or shut up, or tolerating ugly manifestations like extreme sex and griefing? No — only in part. The main problem is that this is an open-ended do-it-yourself world, and 80-90 percent of the people raised on old media of TV and movies cannot do it yourself on the screen; they can only watch the content of others. This will take some time to adapt away from massness. It will mean that the 10-20 percent aren’t whom you beat mercilessly and expect to grow or produce more than they humanly can. It will take time. It’s specialized. There will be pet worlds and doll worlds and flirt worlds for the people who need far simpler interfaces, quicker results, more rewards, less expense, quicker application to real life. That’s ok, it’s part of the Metaverse too. Maybe you would be happier developing in those more shallow and mass applications, because that’s definitely the message for all the SL metaversal start-ups: go pets, go kids, go lite. Do not deepen complex and constantly-changing user-generated and even adversarial content. Except…I think the future of the Metaverse depends on the downloadable world with integrity for identity, intellectual property, geographical contiguousness and user-generated content will be the brains, the hub, the nerve center of the Metaverse, and the pet worlds only ganglions.
The Lindens are essentially a cult. This is a good or bad thing, depending on how you view history, software projects, or any public enterprise. What it means is that they will not share their hand. They can’t. They may not know it. And sharing it breaks the membrane on their magic circle. So inevitably asking them to plan and share means asking them to sustain a FIC.
This means that we have to wean the Lindens from being a cult and learning how to de-program and integrate with the rest of the ecology of life — real life institutions, other platforms, etc. This will take awhile. They achieved what they achieved by being a cult, and that shouldn’t be broken lightly until you can change it carefully without destroying it. Vision away all you want — only cults can sustain this level of human endurance, extreme commitment, dedication required from this largest open interactive software production project in history *involving non-coders*. See, that’s what makes it “the largest” because for the first time, the non-technical user was put inside the product and not kept out.
Oh, absolutely am I looking to the Lindens to be the government *because they already are*. I’m for looking the power issue squarely in the face, admitting that we live under brutal executive rule, and figuring out how to a) liberalize it at least so that it obeys its own laws consistently (always the first step for authoritarian states and b) induce it to separate powers and cede power to competing groups in society that will be managed by a constitution — the rule of law — to which Linden Lab itself is also bound. I am hoping they will become the model for how corporations can cede governance to users peacefully and in orderly fashion with prosperity for all.
To pretend they aren’t the government is to forget who turns on the servers, who enforces the “any reason or no reason” kick-out and ban clauses. The Lindens are open-sourcing the code, Joel. They need to open-source the governance too and not imprint their governance structures on to the code. That’s what they are doing now. They have carefully created a heavy, dense, networked ruling class. Certifieds. Dev groups. Working groups. Volunteers. Lindesidents (residents turned Linden staff). Embargo journalists. You might just call this “the normal special relations any company forms; their normal rolladex”. No. This isn’t a software company. It’s a temporary government presiding over revolutionary software. It might be that Multiverse or Ogoglio or whomever makes a better virtuality software but then their companies will be presiding over their worlds and facing the exact same issues.
The only stake that makes sense in this world where the tier payments are the structure for the revenue, and where the tier-payers, collectively, as much or more as the venture capitalists, is to have a tier-payer representative on the board as a transitional period to open-sourcing government just like code. Every time I’ve written about this in the past, I have noted that it is not *myself* I am trying to put on the board. Obviously, the person on the board has to be a coder or big designer as well as a land owner, beloved of the Lindens or they wouldn’t even consider such an amazingly revolutionary step as putting *the users of the software on the board* (there probably isn’t any such configuration in the known universe). So getting started means having one of their co-opted friends.
Given the outsized attention and service you get, Joel, no, you don’t pay. There should be a higher rate for corporations. This isn’t one man, one vote, one man, one island. That is, today, corporations may have no islands more than furries or transgendered small-time land barons in Second Life. But they will. The whole plan of the grid level concept is to have 444 or 4444 sims in grids that corporations will run, specially-licensed agencies like the grid partners today. And those companies will get the lion’s share of attention. IF the Lindens wish, they will not only dwarf the single and small group end users, they will kill, subsume, or co-opt them! And that in part really changes the nature of Second Life in very serious ways that must be addressed humanely.
If CSI:NY had *worked as planned* it would have paralyzed log-ins for days and weeks, and you would have had to face this really terrible problem: that paying customers who came as individuals and developed sims would be pushed aside in favour of a very high-profile single-corporate entry that even made its own specialized browser to drive all the newbie sign-ups to its properties. Maybe it’s a good thing sometimes that the technology breaks and doesn’t scale, because if it did, you’d rapidly have to understand what it means to have killed off everybody in Second Life in favour of TV-watchers playing detective, with only an ill-prepared software company with ideals unable to cope with the competing social interests at stake *fairly*.
Your notion of democracy and human rights fails to take into account that these aren’t endless extremes; these principles include within them the notion that you can’t take away the rights of others in the name of extending your own. You give someone the right to put an ad anywhere, with a lame TOS restriction, you will merely create more wealthy ad farmers destroying our property values. Sorry, but in my libertarian world, you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to destroy my entire sim’s value, and render my purchase null and void, and the purposes of my neighbours’ null and voice, just to make a buck yourself, by putting up an ugly ad tower. It’s absolutely *not on*. You refuse to come clean on zoning regulations for your publishers, to give yourself “libertarian freedom” as I see now, and that means you cannot be trusted with this concept that will simply go on destroying property values for other people in the name of your ad reach. The only way people get the ad reach out of these pathetic farms on 16 ms is by spam. Do you want to be the Spam King of Second Life, Joel?!
Unfortunately, given that the Lindens won’t zone as you do in real life, creating BIDs or commercial sims or whatever, I’m forced to call upon them to make ad boards a municipal service so that they can ban the destruction of others’ property values by towers going up on prime waterfront, in the middle of beautiful forests, right next to people’s homes, blocking their views in beautiful communities where people do not want, do not expect, and do not click on big ugly ads. That’s why they are in social media, not mass media, Joel.
The Lindens need to sell access to eyeballs in public spaces in a regulated way centrally, where the eyeballs are, because they own the public spaces. The alternative is a sea of spam.
I don’t hear the specifics — and I mean very, very concrete nuts and bolts — about how you will be “ethical”. These are just pretty words, terms you brandish around to tell your clients that you have “convinced the community.” It’s crap. If you cannot say that “I will not sell ads to those who put up boards in residential areas, on waterfronts, in forests, and deploy them only on business sims, commercial areas, roadside,” — then you cannot be believed. There is a simple test: if it is unwanted. Unwanted billboards are not wanted in residential areas, forests, waterfronts. They are tolerated at roadside, on commercial sims, near malls and clubs. This is very specific. This is very concrete. If you cannot come clean on your intentions here, I don’t believe one word of what you are saying. Caring about “inworld” brands means absolutely nothing to me. If you put them in my view on my residential sims, if you put them on my waterside in the empty 16 m2 vacated by Mr. Lee’s failure; if you put them surrounded by forest in Alice, I don’t care if they are inworld brands; I will boycott them. You don’t get to have your business succeed by destroying another’s value. I hear you speaking lofty words about “ethics” and “a TOS” and “letting the publisher decide”. I do not hear you talking about *zoning so as not to destroy another’s value*.
Your narrative is one in which you broadly hint in your first post about people who are professional complainers, then patronizingly refer to me placated by traffic and my land baron instances. You have the power to buy out the existing ad farms and merely replace them with a light TOS that will only have some cosmetic, case-by-case fixes. That *is* being a fat cat, and you’re not hearing it.
What you are failing to hear about the invocation of the Sheep purchase is that the set-asides of service occur despite there being no corporate rate. Anshe Chung pays for 400 sims a month too. She doesn’t have an entire dedicated team of Lindens. This isn’t about you personally and what you do or not do, it’s about you grasping the principles at stake. My God, every corporation has a corporate rate for big buyers. LL needs one too.
The FIC is hated so much as a theory because it is true. No matter how many times I friend, schmooze, call up Reuben Steiger, as much as I can really do that and even do do that, I will never be FIC because this is a world in which creators and develops are installed and instilled as a privileged class. Your first post makes that clear, as “negligible” matters about the society at large, like “whether they cede governance or not” simply do not trouble you.
Oh, I just realized what could easily fix the entire problem I have with your ad network, and make you put your ideals where your mouth and money are: do not sell any ads on the mainland, and only sell them on islands.
There are 12,000 islands, and 4,000 mainland sims. Why sell on the mainland, Joel? It only means buying into existing extortionist ad-farm networks and driving landowners and inworld developers crazy and angering them.
If there is a club on 4608 m2 on a mainland sim, that routinely puts 25 avatars camped on its parcel at any one moment, and angers the other 3 big owners on that sim who are lagged out and have no say in the FPS and avatar slot issue, and you put your sign on some portion of that 4608 because “you let the publishers decide,” you will enter the mainland civil war on the wrong side.
If you go to clubs, malls, rental agencies, stores, meeting venues, educational sims, etc. on islands, they will already have covenants and already have zoning, unlike the laissez-faire Lindens. They will have codes about where signs, especially if spinning or large, should go — roadside, commons, stores but not beautiful waterfront, forests, private homes. So if you sell only to islands, you sell to people who already obey a TOS of their own making and automatically can comply with yours, if it is as you say (you haven’t shown it).
Why continue to insist on even selling on the mainland? It only means artificially propping up extortionists and spammers. There are some commercial and roadside areas where ads might make sense, but in many areas, they are unwanted and the people owning existing 16ms have just been warned to stop extorting by the new Linden policy. So all they’ve done is turned off the for-sale sign on their land, and parked in more firmly and with higher signs to drown out people’s trees (this is the effect of the Lindens’ very partial policy that basically only helped sales of some of their newest sims and screwed over the owners of sims bought before last month).
What is it about the mainland that would lead you to believe that there could be “more eyeballs” there? I’ve asked this question of Philip Linden although he’s probably too busy, but I do want to know: where do the green dots spend their time? Most green dots own or rent and log on to islands. But can it be shown they fly off their islands to more interesting public spaces, clubs, malls, friends on the mainland? I’ll bet we can find some of that, frankly.
Is the idea to reach only newbies on the Lindens welcoming areas? Well, lobby the Lindens, then, like I’m doing, to open up Governor Linden land to ad space.
Try to do the math here. An ad that is where it is wanted, on roadside, by a publisher who wants your revenue and doesn’t fear driving away residential tenants or recreation or socializing seekers or even students and educators, etc. is a minority as far as his eyeball reach. You’d have to multiple him by 4,000 sims to start with, and inevitably fall into prime waterfront, forest, etc. on the way, since the only way that the unscrupulous adsters were able to multiple eyeballs was by hijacking them with spam in places where people wanted to go *for the view*. He’s merely trying to capture people flying around randomly, not coherently with a plan studying where they actually go (hint: they do not go to PG picnic areas in Alice).