Linden Lab CEO: my first two months

Linden Lab’s CEO, Mark Kingdon , has detailed his perceptions of his first two months at the helm on the official Linden Lab blog.

He makes five key points:

1. Second Life users are more mainstream than many assume.

2. The diversity of use cases in Second Life is mind-boggling.

3. Second Life has an enviable business model.

4. Second Life’s killer apps are just beginning to evolve.

5. Second Life is leading the industry toward interoperability.

It’s an lengthy read but my overall impression is it was similar to a pitch a CEO might make for a second or third round of venture capital funding.

What do you think? Do you see a new CEO with a vision for Second Life’s future or someone pitching for more time to pull things together?

“Hey. we’ve done some brilliant stuff here and the best is yet to come” is the overall message. The excitement shown toward Second Life as a meeting application is insular to say the least - some of the upcoming mirror worlds are likely to gain significant traction in this space as they demonstrate superior interfaces, easier setup and better performance.

A promise is made on a separate announcement on usability - to me this remains the number one challenge for a virtual world ground-breaker at risk of being run over by the convoy of tractors coming up behind with some tempting crops to plant.

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Weekend Whimsy

1. Second Life Augmented Reality in Physical Space

Kathryn Greenhill films an installation at the John Curtin Art Gallery at Curting University in Western Australia: “The installation involves the user wearing a headset with a webcam, looking through goggles and using a paddle to “liberate” a 3D avatar from within Second Life.”

2. Just Dance - Second Life - Sine Wave Dance

3. Second Life — Relay for Life Sims Tour Part One

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Age demographics and virtual worlds

Metrics gurus Kzero have released a new breakdown of the age variances by type of virtual world frequented.

There’s no big surprises but the figures do further emphasise the power of the pre-teen and teen market for social virtual worlds.

Thanks to Pavig Lok for the heads-up.

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A year ago on The Metaverse Journal

We started our weekly does of virtual world machinima called Weekend Whimsy

The first featured video:

The Cecil Codex Chapter 5

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Call for chapters: book on ethics in virtual worlds

Got a hankering to write a scholarly article on an ethics and virtual worlds-related issue?

Then check this out. There’s nothing like a book credit on your CV.

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What looks like addiction, but is not - Virtual Addiction, Part 3

I spend hours with my computer. It is my favorite tool. I spend time in and out of virtual worlds; I spend time on and off the Internet, surfing with my browser. I communicate, I work, I play. From the sheer amount of time spent with my machine during the day, according to some measures, it would be correct to say that I am addicted to the behaviour of using my computer. I do not, however, consider this to be an addiction.

Several people within my experience also spend a great deal of time with their computers. Interestingly, the particular people I am thinking of were also at one time thought to be drug addicts. Each of these people suffers from either a physical pain disorder, or from a chemical mental disorder. The drugs they take assist their functioning, above and beyond the side effects they cause. I do not consider any of these people to be addicts, either, with regards to drug use or computer use.

Why is this not addiction?

The most important signs of addiction, and indeed the ones that cry out for treatment, are loss of control regarding the addiction and destructive behaviors of and surrounding the addiction. Neither I nor my friends exhibit these signs in our computer usage nor drug usage; therefore, this behavior is not an addiction, by definition.

Why does it look like addiction?

One of the primary signs attributed to addictions of computer usage is time spent engaging in the behavior. This sign may help with the diagnosis of an addiction, but alone cannot be used to make the diagnosis.

Consider how many hours a day the average person spends at work. Perhaps eight hours all up, divided into an hour for lunch, a couple of hours for meetings and other communications, and the rest for the actual work they do. Then consider that person gets home (two hours for travel), eats (two hours for eating at home), and watches TV or reads (four hours). This accounts for sixteen hours of the day, roughly.

Imagine, then, if all of this could be accomplished from their computer at home. Suddenly, rather than seeing a person spending sixteen hours a day in mindless clicking, there is someone working, communicating, gathering news and information and finding entertainment using the same tool.

Another sign often taken alone and out of context is a lack of face-to-face communication on behalf of a person who uses computers.

There are many different scenarios in which face-to-face communication is not applicable, but for example, consider a person with a physical disability in which face-to-face communication is difficult to achieve. For someone with limited mobility or large amounts of pain, getting out of the house may range from impractical to impossible. Consider sufferers of social anxieties, or autistic folk, who are barely able to communicate face-to-face, but whom are liberated by the digital space.

Is quality of life being gained or lost?

Where there is a gain in quality of life which exceeds the downsides to the behavior, there is unlikely to be an addictive problem. With drugs for pain relief, it has been found that it’s very rare for folks who require the drug for pain relief to exhibit loss of control or destructive behaviors concerning the drug, even though they have a physical dependence on it. There may be withdrawal symptoms and side effects, but overall the quality of life increase for these folks. Being able to take care of themselves, their homes, their families, and having enjoyment in life far outweighs the problems in most cases.

Technology is enabling.

Can you imagine telling someone with no legs to forsake their wheelchair? How about someone with a pain disorder? Are you going to tell people with crippling mental disorders that they are not allowed to take drugs to normalize and enable them? Are you going to tell deaf people they can’t use Teletype in place of the telephone?

Each of these technological advances were radical in their time; some of them were seen as being destructive, to society or to the individual. It’s hard to imagine any of these people being denied their enabling technologies in today’s first world society (one hopes). I hope to live in a future where my enabling computer habits are accepted.

What harm is being done, to whom, if I take care of myself, my family, my house, my dog, my finances and my business, while still spending many hours a day at my desk at home?

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The Watch - virtual worlds in the news

1. Emirates Business 24/7 (UAE) - Why your Second Life is more than Lively. “Virtual history has a habit of repeating itself. Not so long ago, hype surrounding the ‘Second Life’ 3D world seized gamers and companies alike. Now the limelight is on Google’s similar offering, Lively. Google’s virtual world was launched less than a fortnight ago, yet already there are scores of reviews and blogs about it. Very few are from the UAE, where the site appears to have been blocked by the local authorities.”

2. Newsweek (USA) - Living a Second Life Online. “We’ve all heard the warnings: addiction, isolation, a waste of time. But some 50 million people log on to online role-playing games like The Sims and Second Life—and many of them never log off. The makers of a new documentary called “Second Skin,” which hits theaters in September, followed seven hard-core gamers to find out why.”

3. GigaOM (USA) - Will Mark Kingdon’s Reign Boost Second Life? “Back in April, ex-Organic CEO Mark Kingdon took the helm of Linden Lab, replacing its charismatic founder, Philip Rosedale, at a time when the company was already struggling in an increasingly competitive market. While Linden claims to be profitable, its market share has plateaued, with scalability and usability woes keeping the number of monthly active users around 550,000 since last summer. Is Second Life still relevant in this far more dynamic playing field, which now includes Lively, an offering from the Internet’s biggest player? I posed that question to Kingdon a few days ago in an extended conversation at the company’s spacious San Francisco headquarters.”

4. TechNewsWorld (USA) - Second Life: A Wide World for Med, Science Students. “Judith Kung Fu may be just one of more than 14 million computer-generated characters in the 3-D virtual world Second Life. But with her help, her creator may one day save your life. In Second Life, Judith has walked through the walls of a human cell. She has, in a flash, conducted complicated science experiments that took the world’s best minds years to complete.”

5. DMNews (USA) - Social strategy is in this fall. “For their back-to-school efforts, a number of multichannel merchants are marrying micro sites with a significant push into social networking. Some marketers see tie-ins with social networking sites, including MySpace and Facebook, as the biggest opportunity to reach teen agers. But it is uncertain whether these efforts will be enough to ignite teen retail spending, which industry experts predict will be down for the rest of the year.”

6. The Industry Standard (USA) - Google trying to stop the inevitable: Cyber-sex in Lively. “Google’s biggest mistake with Lively may not be the Windows-only release, nor the sketchy functionality. Instead, it’s in forgetting (or ignoring) the driving force of the Internet, which, as the Broadway musical Avenue Q explains, is porn. Google introduced Lively as an all-ages 3D chat application. But, as The Guardian noted a mere day after Lively launched, users quickly figured out how to take things as far as they could with adult content. Google tries to police the adult content as much as possible, but a search will quickly yield scores of rooms designed for cybersex of all kinds.”

7. Mediashift Idea Lab (USA) - Virtual Voting: Finding Our Audience Where They Roam. “A Street Team ‘08 video by our Connecticut reporter plays at Election HQ in MTV’s Virtual World. One of the main components of Knight and MTV’s big citizen journalism experiment, Street Team ‘08, is MOBILE. In our case, the already loaded term has many meanings…our project includes mobile phones, on both the production and distribution sides, and mobile journalists, or those young, carefree reporters-on-the-go with no need for an office, who you keep hearing about.”

8. The Hollywood Reporter - ‘L Word’ virtual world in works. “Showtime has inked a deal with virtual world technology company The Electric Sheep Company to create a standalone Web-based virtual world for drama series “The L Word.” The L Word virtual world, which begins testing next month and formally launches with the debut of the series’ new season in early 2009, will be the first to use Electric Sheep’s new WebFlock, a Flash-based solution that eliminates the lengthy downloads and other technological barriers that have prevented some virtual worlds from attracting the mass market.”

9. The London Free Press (Canada) - A big thumbs up. All three game console makers are officially on the avatar bandwagon, with Microsoft’s revelation that gamers will soon be able to create and customize virtual versions of themselves to mingle online and play games. Microsoft seems to be aiming for something in between Nintendo’s cutesy Mii avatars and Sony’s more realistic and functional Home, which we won’t see until next year. One intriguing aspect of Xbox’s so-called Live Party system is the ability to get together online with friends to share photos, play virtual game shows or even watch movies. It’ll be intriguing to see how (or if) this works when the Xbox Live update hits later this year.”

10. Silicon Valley Insider (USA) - Google’s Lively Is Just Like Second Life — No One’s There But Perverts And Griefers. “We’ve all heard the knock on marketing in Second Life — brands that do it get a splash of PR, but little else. Most brands end up with abandoned virtual storefronts and negative ROI. So last week, when Google (GOOG) introduced “Lively,” its own virtual worlds product we had hopes that it might suceeed where Linden Lab (SAI 25: #11) failed.”

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