The first time I met Mark Kingdon at Linden Lab's San Francisco headquarters in June, I noticed this framed tile of carpet hanging above his desk, containing his message to departing CEO Philip Rosedale, on taking over his role. Kingdon had just left his CEO post at Organic, a successful interactive services company with an impressive client list, to run a user-created virtual world with scaling problems and a year-long growth plateau.
Last week, during my GigaOM interview with Kingdon, I finally had a chance to ask him directly: Why did he take this crazy right turn, anyway?
"Linden Lab and Second Life is a nice intersection of things that I'm really interested in," Kingdon told me. "I guess I would say art, technology, and business. I found that in my old job, and I found that to the power of five in this job, so it was really great opportunity to do all the things I'm really passionate about."
You can read my GigaOM interview with Kingdon here, excerpts from a much longer conversation. Over the next week or two, I'll be running extended portions of particular interest to longtime Second Life Residents, third party developers, and everyone else who's been following the metaverse's future closely.
After the break, Kingdon (known as "M. Linden" in-world) talks about joining "the Lab", as he affectionately calls it, and his immediate plans for improving the Second Life interface/first hour experience; we also talk about developing SL for the Web and for mobile phones-- and, of course, The Love Machine.
Kingdon On Joining Linden Lab
"I've always been really interested in what some would call social computing, which is people coming together to connect and create. A couple years ago I started following Second Life and my old company Organic created its own experience in Second Life using an outside firm, Reuben Steiger's company, and we learned a lot... at the same time, someone introduced me to Philip, and that was a year ago in March, and I had him come to a management meeting at my old company and to talk to us about Linden Lab... and then just about the promise of the virtual world... [afterward] we stayed in touch.
"Fast forward a year, he announced he was going to move into the Chairman's role and look for a new CEO, and I thought about it for 4-5 days, and sent him an e-mail.... we had dinner in New York and just moved on from there.
"Linden Lab and Second Life is a nice intersection of things that I'm really interested in. I guess I would say art, technology, and business. I found that in my old job [as CEO of Organic], and I found that to the power of five in this job, so it was a really great opportunity to do all the things I'm really passionate about. Plus I really really really liked the people and I was overwhelmed by the promise of what Second Life could be.
On How He'll Improve Second Life
"The thing that I did at my old job was really re-focus my previous company on user-centered design, and I think that that’s a really important principle we’re working hard to build in the way we work here at the Lab, to make our users even more central in the design of our product…
"We need to grow our active user base… there’s a steep learning curve, but once you get past that learning curve, it’s a positively addictive experience, and we just want to make it a whole lot easier for people to get to that point, and so we’ve been systematically identifying those barriers and putting plans in place to work on them…
"On making Second Life delightfully usable… particularly for the new user, we need to give them a really simple and intuitive interface and as their capabilities grow and their desire to create content and own land and transact grows, we need to elegantly release those features to them, rather than hit them with 350 menu choices their first moment in-world. So that’s a pretty significant effort I’ve initiated since I joined… The functionality of the viewer should expand as your comfort with the medium grows. How we do that I think will become clear as we spend more time with Residents, we do more research, we test different ideas, but that's the basic premise.
"And I think that’ll make Second Life a lot more accessible to people. Because research in social media has shown not everybody wants to be a content creator. Some people want to connect, some people want to transact, some people want to create, some people just want to observe… we need to take a larger population into consideration in the design process…
Kingdon on Second Life's Recent Concurrency/Active User Plateau, and Fixing It
"One of the things that's essential for concurrency to go up is for the platform to be very stable. We had some platform instability which was making it hard to break through the ceiling on concurrency... I think we're going to be breaking through the ceiling because the platform's been more stable and we've changed the registration process... It's too early to release numbers, but let's just say that feels nicely promising in terms of improvements in conversions. I think we'll see growth even from where we are today without any fundamental big bang changes to the experience...
"I think you’ll see new social tools coming from us that make it easier for you to bring friends along, and I think that’s going to be an important part of building a network effect… and then marry that with the improvements we’re making in the viewer and the first hour experience, and I think that’s a recipe for great growth…
"[I]t'll take us another couple months before you start seeing early or noteworthy changes, but we have a long list of things that we're working on. I don't mean to be cryptic, but it's just a long list, we're doing anything a good experience designer would do, we're breaking down every aspect of the first hour experience from the moment someone hits the website, through the point where we're sure they're comfortable in-world... you can expect a lot of incremental changes while we focus on some of the bigger challenges.
On rumors of the Second Life Viewer Being Developed for Mobile
"Mobile's a very interesting as a market, but technically delivering a rich virtual experience that's scalable on a mobile platform is challenging. We have some work underway in that area already that we're learning a lot from. I think the thing that'll be most interesting is, what's a derivative or an adjunct to the in-world experience that we can build on a mobile platform?
On Developing Second Life to Run on the Web
"Our experience right now primarily is an in-world experience... I'd like to see us kind of move the slider, I guess, more forward for the Web, because there's a lot things you can do to enhance your SL experience as a user that you can do on the Web.... social tools are a really important as a feature set and those are very amendable to a Web interface. So we're actively exploring those kind of things.
On whether Kingdon uses the Linden Love Machine
"Yes, and I love it... it's the hardest thing to explain, and it's the hardest thing to get people to appreciate, but it's really a wonderful way of re-enforcing great work... I'm a heavy Lover, I guess you could say, I think it's terrific.
"Think about it: most companies are focused on negative reinforcement, not positive reinforcement, and this is a company that focuses on positive reinforcement, and you can see it in the culture... I think you get a lot more innovation when you create a safe environment where people aren't afraid to think and push the envelope.
"Sometimes when you're a new CEO you walk in and you take inventory and you say 'Oh my God', like there's just some scary gaps. And I walk in every day and I find kind of a new gift. And one of the greatest gifts in Linden Lab are all the internal tools that exist around managing and motivating people, like the Love Machine... those kind of things just make it so much easier to step in and get ingrained in the culture. It's really cool."
Image credit: Kingdon photo from AdWeek.com. Kingdon’s Second Life avatar “M Linden” screenshot by Crap Mariner
"not everybody wants to be a content creator"
Those words probably sound like sacrilege to some but to me that's the most intelligent and hopeful thing I've heard a Linden say in years. At the moment SL is full of performers, some very talented people, but with very little audience - if we're to move to the next level we need to open the doors and let the audience in.
Here's hoping he gets it done...
Posted by: Eris | Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 04:05 AM
For the first time I have read more about this Love Machine business. To me it sounds like it creates a totally skewered vision on reality. What happens if LL staffers go wrong? I have an image of Lindens with their fingers in their ears, loudly singing happy songs in the face of their own errors.
Some positive motivational force is good, but the positive cannot exist without the negative.
Posted by: Laetizia Coronet | Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 04:21 AM
This is the most encouraging set of statements I've ever heard from a Linden.
One of the biggest ways in which product design goes wrong - and the SL viewer has definitely gone wrong in its evolution - comes from engineers imagining themselves as the user base. This results in products that are completely intuitive to use - if you're a professional software engineer.
M's focus on the *real* users, on improving their experience and enabling it to be tailored to evolving - and divergent! - needs is just what LL and we users need.
Posted by: Sophrosyne Stenvaag | Tuesday, July 22, 2008 at 12:28 PM
"The functionality of the viewer should expand as your comfort with the medium grows. How we do that I think will become clear as we spend more time with Residents, we do more research, we test different ideas, but that's the basic premise."
Spend more time with Residents? As opposed to running and hiding anytime one of them approaches a Linden, especially in a context that is not predetermined (by LL) and carefully controlled (by LL)? My, that DOES sound so crazy it just might work. Maybe the new CEO, a self-described "heavy Lover", would like to mosey on over to here -
http://getsatisfaction.com/secondlife/topics/five_to_one_in_three_days
- and spread a little of that LL love to the Residents. Or is that asking too much from a company that never misses a chance to talk about the "Love Machine"? Interesting that the LM is a way for LL'ers to "positively reinforce" and congratulate *themselves*. I don't recall ever having heard or read about any mechanism intended to provide greater and more useful context for all those positively-reinforced LL'ers. What might that mechanism be? Gee, I don't know, maybe something like "Resident-Experience Reality-Check Machine". Oh sure, it's not as pithy and cuddly as "Love Machine", and a blissed-out Linden could wander by and hurt himself on those hyphens, but it might do wonders for the relationship between LL and Residents.
Yes, I know the "Love Machine" is about LL itself, its uber-hip corporate culture, and so on, but - in all frankness - that corporate culture, and LL itself, are for the most part only of interest because of this little project called Second Life, a project that is dead in the water without Residents. The relationship between LL and Residents is inherent. Yet there seems compelling evidence that LL is content to operate without honest regard for its necessary other half. An oblivious LL seems happy to let this inherent relationship languish and suffer from neglect, and the supposed "Love Machine" is exhibit A: inviting and rewarding in-house praise for positives but ignoring attempts to identify and resolve negatives? How about "Narcissism Machine", "Ego Machine", or maybe, in the spirit of accuracy if one insists on the language of romance, "Infatuation Machine"?
Attracting Residents and keeping them once they've arrived - bravo to M Linden for talking the talk about making this a priority. When he gets around the walking the walk, I'll be the first to throw an in-world Resident Sanctioned(tm) "Love Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry, You Weren't Listening, What Was That Again?" party.
Posted by: Helena Whittlesea | Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 08:21 AM