Mark Kingdon’s recent appearance on Metanomics had hundreds of audience members in attendance at viewing partners and the main venue in Second Life, and on the Web. With such a large and engaged audience there were more questions for Mark (M Linden) than could be answered in the one hour format. If nothing else – this is a demonstration of what truly engaged social media looks like, and that this is a world in which the Residents, well….care.

We’ve tried to summarize some of the questions here. We have aggregated some of the questions and thus removed the name of the person asking the question – hopefully we didn’t miss anything major, but please feel free to post others in the comments below. Hopefully Mark will be able to give some insight or respond, or perhaps return to Metanomics at a future date!

General Questions

- Will the Lab open the server code source?

- There is resident interest in Blue Mars. Where do you see Blue Mars fitting in to the evolution of virtual worlds?

- “Where did you get the blazer and shirt? It looks great.”

- What percentage of the concurrency or uniques are outworld business and what percentage are educators and what socializers

- How many of your 308 staff members are coders versus support, sales and other functions?

- In late 2008, Philip Rosedale referred to possibilities to use Second Life in developing countries for enterprise development. Does Linden Lab have any plans to purposefully include Africa and other developing economies in their future strategy? (on behalf of Uthango Social Investments and some of our clients in South Africa)

Platform Features

- For the rest of 2009, LL’s goals to create new features are what percentage compared to fixing current issues… what is the planned worktime ratio for 2009?

- What specific changes are planned for fixing voice, groups, or otherwise integrating things like note cards or documentation with tools like Google Docs.

- Is any support planned for merging streams and thus allow singers, musicians, DJ’s apart in RL perform meaningfully?

- Will collaboration tools, for example the ability to work on documents in-world, become available?

- When can we expect the “Second Life 2.0” overhaul to be complete?

- “Profiles on the web please… Ability to manage land, send money etc without loading up the client”

- SLim client is very useful now – has M any news on the future “Lite” client?

- Why did Linden abandon the puppetering project?

Policy

- Will the Lab bring back gambling now that age verification is required for adult content?

- Can you provide clarification on whether there are plans to merge the Teen and Main Grid?

- Will adult-oriented content operations be required to move if they are adjacent to PG or M-rated sims?

International Expansion Plans

- Could the move to more of an international presence lead to changes in policy such as VAT or gambling?

- It would be great if your communications were not wholly US based in terms of community – can we expect to see more cultural diversity?

Content, Business and Partnerships

- I would live to see true “Industry Standard” partner program with software and service offerings that could be monetized by a VAR. That, and having an infrastructure of SL Sales and Sales Engineering people to help VARs penetrate target markets with REAL solutions. Did I mention putting them under NDA and giving them a TRUE “Road Map” so they themselves could develop solid business plans for promoting and profiting from SL as a VW platform!?

- What plans does the Lab have to protect content? What are the major issues the Lab is facing around copy protection, trademarks, and are can policy or technical changes help protect content developers?

- On a related note: could you comment on your overall top-down master plan for copyright protection in SL? Do you plan to keep the existing DRM scheme of copy/mod/transfer intact? Do you plan to increase the rate and number at which LL responds to DMCA takedowns? What needs to be done to secure IP in SL against the onslaught of attacks from opensource, Creative Commons, and outright piracy and theft?

- Do you have any plans to advertise Second Life so it is better known to a wider public?

The New User Experience

- Has the retention rate for new users increased? By what percent? Is it still 10%?

- Have you considered forcing not so new citizens off of Help Islands and out of Welcome Areas when there behaviour is such that it drives “normal” people away from SL?

- Are you also polling new users on their interests AND giving them an overview of possibilities

- Why not have stages of viewer, so that you can start with a simple viewer for the noob, moving up to the super user – the development time would reap the retention benefits in the long run

- Is anyone successfully organizing cross-grid volunteers to make the new resident experience better? Also, wouldn’t retention be higher if new residents were actively encouraged to assist others?

Comment by Dusan Writer
I hope the above captures the spirit, at least, of the audience questions. They were aggregated from literally hundreds!

In many ways, they reflect my own thoughts and questions about Second Life and Linden Lab. As someone who works, rezzes prims, socializes and evangelizes for the platform, I’m interested in understanding things both broadly and in the specifics.

Specifically, I want to know that the issues that face us daily are being tackled, and that our concerns aren’t being ignored. A year ago, those issues were lag and stability. Now, those issues (at least to me) are the lack of properly functioning social tools (group chat, integration with e-mail, and the worst document system I’ve ever seen – i.e. note cards), a pressing need to release the new user ‘client’ if we’re ever going to make a dent in the first hour, and unclogging of the asset pipes such that loading a texture from the prim edit menu doesn’t take 2 hours or crash my system.

At a slightly wider policy level, I’m interested in knowing whether the Lab believes that enforcing content protection is a priority, and how it is dealing with trademark and other issues. The Lab stumbled on a few miracles: one of them was building the world in the first place, and the second was creating a content protection and commerce system that clearly demonstrates that the Web does NOT need to subscribe to the “everything is copiable” mentality, and that you can create economic value by letting people – well, own and sell stuff.

At this level, I’m also interested in the execution details of the adult-oriented content changes. But I’m interested in these changes because I’m curious what they imply about the Lab’s attitudes towards geography, zoning, and the possibility that they will foster different community types using geographic metaphors. I’m also interested in this because I wonder whether it provides any hint that they can solve the ‘search’ challenges. The company that can crack the algorithm for 3D search may well be the next Google – if you can search not just on objects but on objects relationships to one another, and do it in a way that returns meaningful results that would be a breakthrough.

At the broadest level, I’m interested in how the Lab’s plans allow for continued participation by Residents, schools and organizations. I believe that the way to achieve this is through communication, road maps, and eliminating unwanted surprises.

M has taken great steps in trying to inform us of where the Lab is headed and has been working to communicate plans for platform improvement and development. These are monumentally useful things. I hope he and other members of his senior team continue to bring clarity as we build the world together.