Philip Rosedale: Balancing The Needs of Enterprise, Educational and Personal Users

Just about every Linden Lab® employee who has appeared on Metanomics has had to field a question on how to balance the needs of the different types of users in Second Life®: enterprise users who want to use a virtual world to connect with customers or telecommuters, prototype products or buildings, or achieve some other corporate goal; educational users who want to teach in schools or the workplace; and personal users who just want to entertain themselves or others.

My discussion with Philip Rosedale covered two key facets of this balance: technical and public relations. I’ve asked Bettina Tizzy of the acclaimed group Not Possible In Real Life to comment on this segment of the interview, because in real life she is a professional in public relations, and in Second Life she is a very public face of Not Possible in Real Life--a community of builders and artists that lies pretty close to the interface of these user types. (Bettina has also spoken quite articulately on Linden Lab’s PR work, as you can see in her appearance on Metanomics. So take a look at Philip’s comments, and then go to see what Bettina has to say.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: … what’s interesting is that it’s kind of like us sharing our DNA with chimpanzees or whatever. There’s a 90 percent overlap in usage requirements between those three segments, and then there’s a ten percent diversity where they’re each looking for different things. So I think, as a company, what we have to do and keep doing is, we have to make small bets, five or ten percent bets where we push new capabilities into the platform, or we simplify some piece of it, or we create some new pricing model or some new operating model, with the hope that it will satisfy the need of an emerging market segment.

So if you look at business use today, what do business users need from Second Life? Well, they need a better control of the naming and registration process. Right? Because it’s just a very personally directed process right now. It’s not perfect for business. They have concerns about firewalls and security and stability. Like, in some cases, they’d like to see five nines of uptime. The very large public grid, which is subject to all kinds of different vagaries and internet providers being up and down – and our colo spaces being up and down – doesn’t afford five nines of uptime right now. Those use cases, solving problems like security, firewall and naming, we can do that as a small initiative within the company, where we can try and solve some of those problems and then see if that takes off, see if that accelerates usage within the business, within, say, the enterprise community. We can try and do the same thing with education, look at enterprise and education to share some of the same needs: account origination, sometimes security, probably a little bit more privacy on the education side, a little more formal security on the corporate side. These are similar needs. So I think that we are really following the same model. And I think [new Linden Lab CEO] Mark [Kingdon]’s focus on usercentered leadership will help us there.

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ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: [T]he Wall Street Journal had that big article about the guy cheating on his wife in Second …. Is that something you guys are trying to manage so that it doesn’t stigmatize Second Life for the enterprise community?

PHILIP ROSEDALE: Well, again, I mean I think the answer there is yes. Certainly, when I talked about security being a requirement for the enterprise community. And I think that content restriction and separation and insulation is a part of, is kind of a close cousin to that part of the problem. So I think that we’re doing the right things, thinking about how to better support the enterprise in looking at how to move Second Life more behind the firewall if we can, add security features, add controls for those users. That said, http, the web protocol, moves around a lot of different types of data, some of it certainly objectionable to enterprise users, and enterprises still use it. So I think that there is a future where, again, there’s a single standard; maybe the branding is a little different, but there’s still a single standard for how you use virtual worlds and how you interconnect them. I think that’s going to work out because, again, I remember the early days of the web. There was, of course, a real concern that corporations were being stigmatized by building websites because there were so many other websites that they thought were objectionable or adult content or whatever. So I guess I’m not kind of giving you a clear answer because I don’t think there is one.

I think that you’ve got to let people broadly create content in as open a way as possible. There’s a meeting in the middle. I think enterprises will recognize that the utility gains that they can get from taking advantage of virtual worlds are very high, and they’ll be willing to tolerate the fact that, yeah, if they wanted to kind of brandapprove their neighborhood, the fact that they’re in a virtual world, and, yeah, there’s content they don’t like in a virtual world, they’re just going to have to live with that.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: But you do have some control over the perception. I know, for example, there were controversies over the Second Life fifth birthday celebration where certain groups were in, and then they were out, and then they were in, and they were out. It appeared at least to be Linden Lab attempting to manage then and reduce the perception of not safe for work behavior.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: Inevitably, this is such an exciting new space that there is a lot of media hype, so I think we do sometimes try to tone things down a little bit. I think we need to do more of that as time goes by, to just say, “Hey. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.” Reasonably speaking, here’s what the picture looks like. It’s not all one type of content. It’s not all business use. It’s not all marketing. It’s not all any one particular type of thing. It’s funny, mostly our PR strategy has simply been to help connect and embellish the stories that kind of come from the community anyway. I mean, for every stressed-out story about people’s love lives or infidelities or whatever in Second Life, there’s a story that’s equally good about people meeting in Second Life, or some people learning in Second Life, or whatever.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Someone with Asperger’s Syndrome. Right. [There are lots of great stories about people with Asperger’s, social phobias, drug dependencies and the like who have found Second Life incredibly helpful.]

PHILIP ROSEDALE: So it’s kind of like do you suppress one and then suppress all the others? We’ve really taken a pretty handsoff approach. Fundamentally, our media cycle, at least historically, has been driven more by people coming to us and saying, ”Hey, can you tell me more about this person or this activity or this content that I heard about?” And then, as a company, we try and facilitate that access. So sometimes we’ll take somebody from the media and we’ll introduce them to the best example of that content or whatever, something like that. So we’re sort of running around trying to make those connections inworld. But it’s such a big category, it’s such a big space, I almost don’t know. This happens a lot with Second Life. It’s almost like we wouldn’t have the manpower to police or monitor or control or even come up with a strategy that was much more.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Now Mark [Kingdon, the new CEO of Linden Lab] is more from communications and marketing, right? In his prior jobs, he was pretty active on that so maybe do you expect him

PHILIP ROSEDALE: His degree is in economics. Did you know that?

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: No, I didn’t know that. But I was thinking of some of his prior work and the things I’ve heard. People speak very highly about his [work in marketing and communication.]

PHILIP ROSEDALE: I think the biggest thing that Mark does internally, and I think that that’s of course more of what I’ve seen thus far and what we’ve all seen, is how Mark works with everybody internally. He actually drives more internal communication and crosscommunication about what’s going on, and I think that’s great. I mean that’s something that you see people complain about in the community, that the Lindens aren’t talking to each other enough. Mark really pushes us to do more of that, which is great. He’s created more internal forms for communication than I did, and I think that’s really a good step, especially given our size now. So I think it’ll be a good trend. And I think that you will start to see it in the community as well. There have already been signs of that. You’ll see how I think he’ll lead us to communicate in richer and different, yeah, probably more varied ways with the community, with everybody that’s using it. Forward looking with our intentions on product.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I’m sure the community would appreciate that.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: It’s funny. It’s always been a frustration because I always feel like, “Man! We’ve done our best. It’s such a huge project.” But I think that he’s going to have ideas and fresh ideas that I wouldn’t have had that’ll really help us.

If I were any good at public relations, this blog would have a lot more readers! Bettina , what do you think?