Top Ten Takeaways on Second Life's Future From My Interviews With Philip Rosedale & Brad Oberwager

Originally published on my Patreon

Since last week's interviews with Linden Lab head Bradford Oberwager and newly-appointed CTO Philip Rosedale were so voluminous -- between them both, the raw chat transcript was easily over 10,000 words! -- here's the core revelations boiled down to ten key takeaways:

Philip is not aiming to create a Second Life with an extremely mass market of users:

Philip Rosedale:  I'm perfectly happy making it a really positive experience for a much smaller number of people. Like, that's totally fine… I'm struck by the opportunity. If we're a happy place for people like moms and vets, are there really only as many of those worldwide as we have using Second Life today? I'll leave it to you to do the same math as I have.”

Over the years, roughly 50 to 60 million people have tried to install Second Life, but gave up for various reasons, usually due to addressable technical or design hurdles. A virtual world with 50 million monthly active users would be on par with the population of South Korea.

Likely applications of AI in Second Life are a “matchmaker” to SL people and content, and an avatar appearance assistant:

PR: So when you think about AI and Second Life, I want that AI to be a matchmaker between real people. One of the fantasies I’ve had is, imagine you have an AI that’s like a bot that says, “Come with me, James, and then it takes you, and it introduces you to somebody you might like. “I’m going to take you to this island where this guy built a lot of stuff I want to show you.” 

That feels to me like a good use of AI. Having the AI be a sex bot, but you fall in love with it forever, does not feel like a good idea to me. 

[An] AI might be able, for example, to help you put clothes on or change your clothes. Imagine the AI getting a permission and saying, “Hey, Hamlet can you click on this dialog box?”, and then, “I'm going to put another shirt on you.” 

Improved Spatial Audio and Speech-to-Text is coming to SL:

PR: [I]imagine Second Life, imagine text and audio, everything is converted to the other. So if you type text, it says Audio [as a UI option].  If you want to hear it, you just hear it. If you say something, it captions it and puts it into text. And so imagine Second Life being so accessible, because you can just use text or voice, you can turn the audio off, you can see the captions, we can start translating stuff to people in different languages. There's all these opportunities that I think are examples of how that's a really nice thing. 

WJA: [S]peaking of spatial audio, do you think we'd be able to improve live music with that? Like you can have more people? 

PR: Yep, stereo transmission, more people, lower latency. So yeah, yell at the band, they can yell right back at you. Well, if you remember High Fidelity, the same architecture we're building here will allow stereo streams and the whole thing. So you can do spatial and then if somebody wants to broadcast stereo, you can kind of set up the speakers, or whatever you want to do. So we'll have all those same capabilities built into Second Life as we modernize that system.

Seven more beyond the break!

The recent re-organization of Linden Lab was done to put much more focus on developing the mobile app:

Brad Oberwager: As you can imagine, the person who could do that on mobile is not the person that could build amazing things on a desktop. That's what a re-org is. I need more people who can do commerce on mobile than I need people that can do work on the old system. I think people are gonna love the mobile app. I'm putting a lot of money behind that hope. 

An updated version of the Second Life mobile app will be free to download for everyone in "weeks":

BO: Right now [the app is] paywalled because it would have broken for everybody. This thing's getting open real soon..

WJA: Yeah. Well, so how soon’s that? Is it the next quarter? Next two quarters?

BO: That it’s going to be opened up to everybody? Weeks.

The mobile app will include an optional gaming mechanic to encourage continued usage:

BO: [W]’re going to be creating a system of rewards for what we need to start seeing, which is more interactions. However, in awesome Linden fashion, you can turn them off if you don't like them! So we are coming up with a way where, if you're interacting on the mobile app, if you're coming three days in a row, things like that, you're gonna be able to get stuff. 

PR: We had some gaming loops we're playing with on mobile, but we actually put in the settings  you could turn them off if you don't want any gaming. That's the conversation that the world needs right now -- do I want my dopamine or do I not want my dopamine? I think it's pretty funny to say, “We'll just give you a choice.” But yes, we are playing with gamification elements as well. 

The mobile app will not be integrated with a Linden Dollar in-app purchase option (yet), so SL brands will not be hit with Apple/Google’s 30% commission:

WJA: [F]or concerned creators -- what happens when they have to contend with IAP, 30% revenue, Apple and Google's cut?

BO: They're not going to get hit with that. The app is getting opened up. If there was a 30% [cut] it would be from buying the Linden Dollar. Apple doesn't care what happens in the world. Apple cares about what someone buys with USD. 

So if I buy Linden Dollars, it's not a currency -- I'll buy tokens, and I give you the Linden Dollars in return for a service, that's not what Apple makes money on. That's not their gig. And Linden Dollars aren't going to be for sale through the app right away. 

When they are, we gotta negotiate with Apple, because that creates a big problem, because I don't get the money when you buy a Linden Dollar.

Second Life's monthly active user numbers have declined to around 500,000 MAU.

WJA: [S]o we're about 500,000 monthly actives, is that about right?

[Oberwager nods]

BO: The number of daily active users [DAU] is significantly less than that, as you can imagine. We’ve made some mistakes recently, you know, we've had some performance issues with the viewer and things like that, and we're scrambling to change it. It's not easy. And so our DAU has gone down, that's very concerning. Because it makes for a worse experience for everybody. It's not just the numbers to me, it’s the folks there [in SL] that you're friends with and stuff, it's a worse experience.

WJA note: This is a fairly significant loss of active users, because Second life’s MAU has been closer to 600,000 for many years.

The recent Linden Lab re-org has nothing to do with any potential acquisition of the company, which is not on the table.

WJA: Because of all these cuts or re-org, there were a lot of rumors that you were trying to set Linden Lab up for an acquisition. So is that true?

BO:  No.

WJA: Just plain “no”?

BO: Well, I could give you not a flip answer, but if someone came and offered me $4 billion, I can guarantee you I would take it. So when people say the company's not for sale and stuff like that, it's a stupid thing for people to say. They eventually look stupid at some point. 

So Linden is not going public, and I'm doing this for a lot of reasons. There's not one bit of this that was done to set us up for an acquisition. And the reason I can tell you that that is a surety is because a lot of these things we’re doing are extremely long term in terms of the benefit that we're going to get, and are more expensive than we were doing it before. 

So that is a fact. It never crossed my mind to do this, to set us up for an acquisition. This was set up for future growth, and that's not happening anytime soon. It's going to take a while to work its way out. We need to start growing again, and this was one of the reasons that we did it. 

Philip Rosedale is re-joining Linden Lab to help encourage a future for virtual worlds which respects user privacy and lacks exploitative advertising.

PR: I'd like [virtual worlds] to be a positive experience, without evil advertising or surveillance or whatever. Without needing to read a Cory Doctorow book, we know that could get pretty bad with virtual worlds. So that's another reason why I'm pretty motivated.” 

That's my read-out to these massive interviews with Philip (part 1 here, part 2 here) and Oberwolf (part 1 here, part 2 here).

If I missed any takeaways, my pixel Patreon peeps, please post in Comments below!

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Comments

[Stara]

Hard pass on AI in SL basically becoming an adbot and peddling clothes to me or places to go. I come to SL to choose where I go what I want to wear and all the rest. Sounds like corporate takeover to me.. now even in SL we'll be slapped in the face with advertising even more than we already are. No thanks. I'll decide what I want to wear, and where and when I want to go. I'm not a brainless twit like most folks in SL.

[Luther Weymann]

Over sixteen years and the hundreds and hundreds of Day 1 avatars that I have IM'd after seeing them in Nearby and asking if I can help, I would estimate that nearly 90% DID NOT know the following:

How to rez.
What the SL Market is.
How to visit Muddy's and go dancing.
How to click on a dance ball and be part of the group dancing.
How IM works.
What a sandbox is and how to rez your free stuff from the SL Market.
There are free clothes and free bodies on the SL Market.
How to get free stuff inworld.
That in the menu there is Destinations
There is a world map.
You can go boating and flying.
SL can be your virtual escape hobby.
If it looks male or female it may not be in RL.

My experience of spending one hour with a Day 1, taking them through that list, and Friending them is that most of them will also have a Day 100.

[Luther Weymann]

You see, the problem with keeping and building SL Residents is that the management of SL is far more interested in mobile apps, AI, and Samsara ($50M wasted) than they are in ever doing a whole, from scratch, rewrite of the ancient 20+-year-old legacy code that operates SL, and of getting those Day 1 avatars I wrote about above a fighting chance to acclimate to the SL world by showing them what SL really is. SL is a “personal” experience, not an “impersonal” experience. If you want to get into AI, maybe you should think of some way a Day 1 avatar can be shown SL properly.