I asked a question about “Nebraska” that I think went over the heads of many but was seconded by AM Radio and others. The question in lay terms is, “What about SL behind the firewall products and offerings? How are they doing?” based on information released in this blog post about Second Life Behind the Firewall. Frankly I am really surprised this question didn’t get asked more, but perhaps because those interested didn’t seem well represented by attendance.

Great to see these compiled, this is great to show those who couldn’t attend what the backchat covered too, and I hope will foster further discussion AND some answers

I am very interested in what M feels is the role of nonprofits, specifically the growing number of grassroots organizations in SL.  How are their efforts being supported by Second Life and what should we do to get more of the kind of support from SL that the businesses and education facilities receive?

Greetings everyone! Dusan and Robert, thank you so much for having me on Metanomics.  What a pleasure! It was a very impressive production with a great audience. I enjoyed it and I hope we can do it again soon.  Thank you all for attending yesterday and for sharing your questions. I’ll answer some now then come back later to answer more.  It’s 6:13 SLT as I start this so some of the questions about numbers will have to wait ‘til the team is out of bed   So, here’s a go at some of the questions:

GENERAL QUESTIONS:

We don’t have plans to open the server code.

I’ll answer the Blue Mars question with a question—do you mean from a pro content perspective?  A casual gaming perspective? The target audience?

Since we don’t ask people to identify themselves (at least not yet) as a consumer user, an educator, a content creator, an RL business, etc. when they register, it’s hard to give you specific numbers for the unique users or proportion of peak concurrency they represent. We’ve done some analysis to understand revenue sources and our belief is 15-20% comes from RL businesses, government and educators…but again that’s a very rough number.  We’ve started to do some segmentation analysis and socializers are a very large part of the Resident population.  Hence our focus on social tools.

Blazer and shirt are from EDO (Styles of Edo)—one of my favorite men’s designers in Second Life.  He made the coat and tails that I frequently wear.  We need MORE men’s designers in Second Life!

Developing economies are definitely a part of our future. In fact, our growth has been surging lately in developing markets around the world.  The beauty of the Second Life experience and economy is that you can be anywhere in the world and participate if you have a computer and are connected to the grid…and many people do. Things like language support become more difficult in smaller markets although our next viewer release will feature a good number of additional languages thanks to the hard work of wonderful Residents around the world!

PLATFORM FEATURES
Half of the company is focused on what we call strategic initiatives and the other half on sustaining initiatives.  Strategic initiatives are things like the redesign of the first-hour experience (website, viewer, first landing experience), international market development (including internationalization of our software and localization of the content and experience), technical must-dos (related to scaling our infrastructure and continuing to improve stability), ecommerce (building on our recent acquisitions of XstreetSL and Onrez) and a host of others.  These strategic initiatives are not just about creating new features but also about improving the experience and enabling SL to expand and grow.  Sustaining initiatives include all things (including bug fixes) related to supporting and sustaining Second Life.  Our developers are very roughly split in the same way with respect to adding new features vs. fixing current issues although frankly when we are working on the code to add new features we are trying to clean things up at the same time. Why open up the patient twice?    This is Howard Linden’s mantra…when you see something broken, don’t step over it, fix it!

Groups, group management, notecards and messaging in general all need and will get an overhaul.

We absolutely have to make it easier for musicians and other performers to perform meaningfully in Second Life.  We’ve looked at the challenges extensively and have a good idea of what we need to do but we won’t be able to get to it in 2009. We see live performance as a “killer app” in Second Life.

We need more and better collaboration tools.  It’s clear from enterprise and education customers.  Our Chief of Product (T Linden) ran the knowledge worker unit at Adobe so he/we know the tools and the space pretty well. First we want to get the base experience right, then we’ll be working on the tools.  I’d like to do it all at once but the list of to-dos is longer than my arm.

The Second Life 2.0 overhaul is well-underway.  You’ll see the first major elements towards the end of the year and early next year.  The work—as you can imagine—is very complex because any experience change touches the web, the viewer, the simulators, the databases and our infrastructure. When will it be complete? Well, sometime before my hair goes completely gray. Joking aside, its an 18 month process for the major elements.

Profiles on the web are coming.  Our second busiest page on our website is the place where you can find your friends online.  I could build an empire around that alone!  So, yes, social tools are coming.

Glad to hear SLim is very useful.  Stay tuned for some upcoming voice announcements.  It is a big part of our future product strategy.  Did you know we serve about a billion minutes of voice a month?  That’s a big number in VOIP.

That’s all for now folks. I’ll try to get back later today to answer the remainder of the questions.  Thank you, M Linden.

The cost of land is the greatest hurdle to establishing nonprofits in Second Life.  The discount that Linden Lab provides for land used by educational and nonprofit organizations is already a tremendous help.  Anything that is done to further mitigate the cost of land for nonprofit and educational uses will probably result in instantaneous and dramatic increase in the number of those kinds of projects.

I think contests that award land to public benefit projects are a great idea, by the way.  It’s great impetus for building a team to achieve something good.  The winners have a chance to launch their new project and gather momentum.  If there are several competitions during the year, it will give teams who don’t win at first another chance to show their stuff.

any news on when we will get some data on island sales and attrition due to openspace change of prices? Still seems like land sales are the heart of SL revenues and it is critical to know what paying customer growth really is.

Thank you, M, for taking the time to provide a detailed response with such short turnaround!  Not everyone will agree with all of the policy decisions being handed down to the residents (myself included) but it’s reassuring to know that the man at the helm is listening and taking feedback into consideration.

...and there’s more (if you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading!)

POLICY:
Age verification is not the current barrier to gambling. There are other things we’d have to work through around general access in specific geographies. Right now, we’re focused on renovating our core offering.

There are no plans to merge the Teen and main grid at this time. Philip and I dream of a single grid and wax poetically when asked but frankly it’s not on the roadmap now.

For questions on adult content, there has been a lot of dialog already on the Second Life blog and forums.  That’s the best place for you to go for questions on that topic.

INTERNATIONAL EXPANSION:
We’re a lot more focused on the user experience for non-US users. This year we are starting with the basics…translating the website, viewer and relevant support materials into the local language, putting relevant payment mechanisms in place and figuring out our infrastructure needs.  Over time, we’ll look at other new business opportunities.

More to come…

M:

Thanks so much for your replies - it’s really nice to feel your engagement in the community.

You have mentioned a number of features in development, ideas, etc. For example, you call music the ‘killer app’, or mention that we need better collaboration tools. And - well, you know how excited I am about the possibility that a new user interface can improve the experience (although brace for the back-lash if content creators are suddenly left struggling to find out how to rez a torus, but let’s leave that for now).

But I’m curious how you engage the community in some of this development. I’m not necessarily an advocate for ‘design by committee’ - when I ran the user interface contest, for example, I didn’t expect to get “THE ONE”, but I did hope that it would kick off a discussion at least of features, philosophies and approaches that might be useful. I have no idea whether it was connected, by the Imprudence viewer sort of started after that contest, for example - and it has done a nice job on a number of fronts.

Where I’m going with this: while you have amazing executives, by the sounds of it, with experience at places like Pixar and Adobe - what is your philosophy on how to engage the community as a source not just of usability or other data, but as a source of insight, ideas, and creativity?

Again - I don’t think that the Lab NEEDS to have a sort of ‘crowd source’ approach to these things - but just look at your comment about music. There is a lot of debate in the community right now over how to make music better, more profitable, etc. I’m curious how you tackle this question.

Next - I don’t mean to imply at all that you’re evading the question, but can you provide some insight into whether the Lab has plans to better articulate its attitudes towards content protection and to lay out the metrics and investments that you’re tracking and making so that the drivers of the SL economy are protected? Maybe you don’t see this as content protection but feel that by owning XLStreet you have better a better ability to monitor and protect the economy from fraud or copybots?

Can you talk a little about how you interlink policy, enforcement, monitoring and code towards ensuring that the SL content economy remains sound? I’m a big believer that SL has struck on a miracle in the C/M/T model and if the platform really grows to the numbers you’re talking about, it’s an important feature to protect.

Thank you again for your replies. You may not be able to answer all questions, but knowing that, or knowing that “an answer will come this summer” or whatever makes a big difference, and your voice in the community is welcome.

Re: “We don’t have plans to open the server code.”

Great!

So…copyright protection for you, but not for us, Mark?

I don’t see you answering the copyright questions here.

I am, too, impressed by the response time.  I expected to log in and see my question hanging.  How cool that you do respectfully offer an answer, even though it may not completely answer the question.  Thank you for that.

I’ve been bringing up the nonprofit/grassroots organizations because I have a sense that they are coming well into their own in the virtual world.  Second Song for Amnesty has experienced an incredible success and will relate to success not only in human rights but in highlighting Second Life’s musicians and the use of virtual worlds for grassroots organizations.  I believe we are producing the first benefit cd to come out of Second Life through Amnesty International-E which is Second Life’s Amnesty International officially recognized group.  We are very proud of that - but we got little media support from SL.  I know it’s a burgeoning SL feature but what an incredible tool for nonprofit organizations.  Second Pride’s festival in SL is huge and will mean REAL money for these nonprofits.  I’m curious, really curious about your opinions of who we are, where we’re going and where you see going with us.

Thank you, again, for responding so quickly to the questions posed.  I think of all of the features SL affords, the communication between the users and those of you that we use represents the greatest means for success for all.

I’m back!

CONTENT/COPYRIGHT PROTECTION
That is a huge topic and one I am not going to cover here except to say we hear your concerns and we are working on some things that can help.  I’ll check with the team working on this area to see when they might be ready to talk about our work.

THE NEW USER EXPERIENCE
Retention fluctuates from month to month but its been trending steadily upward over the past 12 months. In fact, retention of Active Users at the 1 year mark is almost 1.5-2x what it was a year ago. It’s not a figure we regularly report but that’s your reward for reading such a long Q&A!

We are going to be completely reworking the Help Island/Welcome Area experience.  My dream is for us to have many different kinds of first landing locations so that new users can start in SL in an experience that’s relevant to them (e.g., if you are into jazz music, you start in a location that is appropriately themed).  As for more experienced users misbehavin’ in the Welcome Areas…that’s not a good thing and they shouldn’t be driving out new users.

Yes, we’ve been polling new users (active and inactive) to understand their interests. And, if they didn’t stay with us, why. Usability issues aside, when new users enter Second Life and successfully find and connect with people, places and things that are relevant to them, they tend to stay. That’s why we’re working hard on usability but also new find and discover tools. 

We’re hard at work on the new viewer. It is a very difficult design challenge. Happily, we’re making great progress! I’m very excited about the new direction.  We’ve talked about having a viewer that exposes functionality as it’s needed. So, a new user would start with very basic functionality and as their experience grew, they could access more advanced features.  We’re not sure whether this is the direction we’ll pursue. We’re designing with the long-term in mind and working through each major area of functionality step-by-step.  We started with Communications because that’s central to the experience and with voice/text x IM/local/group you have a very complex set of interactions to design. T and Howard will talk about this more on the Second Life blog in the coming months.

As for community involvement, we’ve gotten a lot of great input, we’ve done market research on how/where new users fail, we’ve done usability testing on the old viewer and we feel we have a lot of information and data informing the process. Right now, our team is heads-down on interface design.  Some of the design problems in the current viewer are blatant enough that we don’t need to get much more external validation to know they are broken. Just look at how the voice and sound controls are found in multiple locations! That being said, creative ideas from the community are ALWAYS welcome, ANYTIME.  When T and Howard blog about the new viewer, they can talk about community involvement as we get further along.

New users fail for a variety of reasons. One area is language comprehension.  I am confident we’ll continue to see retention improve as we release additional languages in upcoming viewer releases and as we localize content on the website. Amazingly, we grew to more than 600K active users (with 1/2 outside the US) with an English-only user experience, so I am excited to see what happens when we have the experience fully localized.

New users frequently meet experienced Residents inworld who show them the ropes. Helping new users find people and groups that match their interests is something we have in our plan for this year.

LAND SALES/ATTRITION
Last month, T Linden blogged on Land sales/attrition in his Q1 overview. That’s a good place to start if you are interested in the health of the Land market and the Second Life economy.

I think I have answered all the questions I can.  Thank you for your patience and your passion for Second Life.

Cheers!

Hello M,  I wasn’t able to attend but I’m curious if there are any plans for accessibility options for the new UI.  This is a feature many of us that are visually disabled have requested for a long time.  This would include font options(other than small/med/large), screenreader options, and possibly other accessibility options.  Thanks for your time.

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