Philip Rosedale: Broadening the Use Cases of Virtual Worlds

Several themes from my interview with Philip Rosedale focused on the future of Second Life® and the larger virtual world industry. One theme that Philip pushed pretty hard is that people are using Second Life in so many different ways—in techspeak, “use cases” are broadening—and that this is a necessary path for success.

This perspective is somewhat at odds with comments from some industry observers, Christian Renaud, Steve Prentice and Mitch Wagner, but I will let Philip make his case first. At the end of this post, you can see what Christian, Steve and Mitch have had to say on the matter. Then, go here to get Christian’s reactions.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Where do you see the industry going in the next two, three, maybe five years, if you can look that far? And what’s Linden Lab®’s role going to be?

PHILIP ROSEDALE: Well, so if you look at Second Life and you go back two years, and you look at the number of distinct welldefined things that people were doing, and you look at the number of things people are doing today, it seems to me at least that the use cases are broadening. This is interesting. Sometimes you have a product that starts out kind of diffuse, and then it focuses itself on one use case so that would be like if Second Life was all live music; something like MySpace or something now where everything that was going on in Second Life was basically around live music. And if you just did the numbers, it was all there. Well, that’s not true. What it seems to me has happened is, we’ve seen a significant broadening in the large use cases, so education and business are now something that people are actually doing in Second Life, where two or three years ago, they really weren’t. It was playful. People talked about it maybe being useful for education and business, but there was certainly no actual pragmatic use.

So why I say that is, I think where the industry is going in the next few years is a gradual broadening of the capabilities and the use cases of virtual worlds, to support a lot of different stuff that people are doing in the virtual worlds. I do believe, as I said today, that it’s difficult for me to see why it won’t be the case in a few years’ time that virtual worlds are not used for a very broad set of utilities and use cases and that that will bring them into a place of probably dominant use in the computing environment, meaning that more network traffic and more computers are basically deployed to enter and interact in virtual worlds than we are, for example, using them for the web today.

So I think you can explore certain use cases, and you can explore some of the UI problems in these other very purposeful worlds, but until you get into allowing people to create their own content, fundamentally create their own complex content, you haven’t even begun solving the big problems that are going to be daunting.

I mean it’s a little bit like the difference between the chat rooms in AOL and a web page. Chat rooms in AOL were highly structured. They were purposeful. They were highly utilitarian. AOL built a great business around those chat rooms, but they were a very simple and controlled incarnation of a broader phenomenon, which was people’s ability to arbitrarily create content and deploy it to each other. And that happened in the midnineties with the emergence of web pages. And the set of technologies and policies and practices and economies that were built around those web pages, that was the real robust solution that was complicated, and that we all kind of gradually moved over to there in the midnineties.

So I think that chat rooms and these more controlled environments, the CompuServes and the Prodigies and the predecessors to the internet as we know it today, they provided very valuable learning and use cases and, in some cases, businesses and business models. But there was this transition that happened to the more generalized environment, and I think that we represent the same sort of thing, the more generalized environment which is just letting people be able to create anything they want, but now in a 3D environment rather than a 2D web environment.

I hear people say all the time, and I think there’s a common thought that there are these very narrow use cases that will dominate the early stages of virtual worlds and that those use cases will be very robust and that you’ll have a very, very isolated and specific virtual world that’s just for teenagers. And then you’ll have another completely different isolated virtual world that’s just for business collaboration. And I actually think what we learned from looking at the internet is that that’s very unlikely to be true. That because there’s some efficiency that can be gained, say, from building the content the same way in both those cases, largescale economies tend to really take advantage of those efficiencies.

And so our belief as a company and our strategic direction has and will continue to be that we think it’s really likely that these different solutions will be rapidly compressed together and unified into some sort of a standard. I think that, if you look at a use case like the historical uses of Second Life experientially in its first years, the ways people have used it to create content, to create homes and experiences and community experiences together, and then you look at education and business collaboration as two new spaces, you can ask the question: Well, is there going to be reuse of content to enable these two applications? Are the people that built great content in Second Life two years ago going to be highly advanced in their ability to build education content in Second Life or collaborative workspaces? The answer is yes. They’re highly empowered now to do that. And so that really suggests that there’s going to be some sort of a unified environment.

Philip’s comments made think of previous discussions I have had on Metanomics. One discussion was with Christian Renaud, formerly of Cisco and now of the Technology Innovation Group, who emphasized different tools for different uses:

CHRISTIAN RENAUD: I owned a Porsche before my kids were born, and I never tried to use it as a truck because that wasn’t the type of tool that it was. I think there’s a logical fallacy in saying this is beautiful, and it is. Second Life is great, and it’s a great tool for a few things. It’s not a great tool for everything. And I think where the flaw comes in, in talking with analysts like Peter and John especially because they’ve been through a lot of these cycles, and they’re very insightful and cutting. Every time I’d say, “Well, look at this opportunity for a spatial audio,” and they’d say, “Well, you can bolt that onto Skype. You can bolt that onto a number of things. There’s Codex out there to do that. Look at web conferencing.” Every time I’d bring up a use case, they’d bring up a counteruse case. And quite frankly, if you have a particular thing that you want to do--I participated in a customer meeting first thing this morning, and the best tool for that was not a Virtual World; it was the Adobe application, the WebEx competitor.

A second discussion was with Steve Prentice of Gartner, Inc. and Mitch Wagner of Information Week. Both apparently would agree with Christian that virtual worlds are not the single tool for all uses, but seems to think that Linden Lab disagrees:

STEVE PRENTICE: If you want a Virtual World to be successful, I think you’ve got to know who you're targeting at, where the focus is. And the question, and I always hesitate to give it out in this sort of forum is: Where is the focus for Linden? Who is the audience, the community, if you like, that Second Life is focused at and targeted to? Sure, there’s a community of users and residents today, but, as Mitch has said, that’s kind of flattened off a little bit, and what’s the next stage of development there.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Mitch, you want to take a stab on behalf of Linden Lab answering that question Steve just asked. Who is the target demographic for Second Life?

MITCH WAGNER: People who live on planet Earth. And this is only until extraterrestrial life is discovered, then it’s going to be everybody in the universe. Linden Lab has a very messianic vision of the future of virtual worlds and Second Life’s role in that. I don’t think they’ve really--I don't like speaking for Linden Lab, but I’m pretty sure they haven’t got any kind of vision of constraint at this point.

So, everyone seems to agree that Philip’s vision is broad. The question is whether that breadth is an essential element of success (as Philip believes) or a troubling lack of focus (Steve and Mitch’s take). For some insight, here is what Christian Renaud has to say.

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