New World Notes

Second Life's World Map Working After 5 Month Outage, CEO Announces

Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg announced last weekend on Twitter that Second Life's world map is, after an outage that started last November, finally working.

I'm fairly fascinated that it took so long to update this issue, and how it is (or isn't) related to Project Uplift, moving SL to the Amazon web cloud.  ("Now that Uplift has finished," the incident report read in January, "we are working to restore the map tile functionality.") I've reached out to Linden Lab for an official response and will update this post when/if I get one.

Also notable: Ebbe Altberg announcing something about Second Life on Twitter after a long absence from Twitter -- his last tweet before announcing the world map had been fixed was also from last November.

Hat tip: Gogo, whose tweets get results!

SL At the End of Major Innovations After Uplift? (Comment of the Week)

My post on Jim "Babbage" Purbrick's long-ignored C#-in-Second Life integration provoked many "Oh what could have been" responses, both here and across social media. (Especially poignant to read posts by other former Lindens, remembering this project fondly, if bittersweetly.) For example, this comment from reader Pulsar, who not only bemoans the loss of this C# feature, but who also sees it as a sign of Linden Lab's waning interest in innovation:

I can imagine what SL could have been with C# and many other things.

Second Life instead has been a story of poor decisions, missed opportunities, half-baked new features, that also introduce new serious, user-experience hampering, bugs... that get fixed after ages if never.

Now Linden Lab can't even fix the world map, broken since several months ago. Preview grid (Aditi) inventory can no longer be synchronized since November 2020. Screenshots still tend to fail to upload to my.secondlife, teleport failures, objects not showing up in the viewer until you right click and so on. All stuff that shouldn't have passed any serious QA check in first place.

"It kind of works and it doesn't explode entirely" seems the way to go for Linden Lab.

It would be great having C# in SL, but, yeah, VRChat allows that indirectly. I don't expect anything competitive coming out from Linden Lab anymore. Other virtual worlds are implementing anything that Linden Lab should have done, never did and probably will never do. People used to SL would be amazed to try out any other virtual world and see that it just works without falling apart. None of those can fully replace SL for now (in general, while subjectively it depends on what you do), but the strong points are getting fewer and fewer, while SL is being surpassed in so many other areas.

My strong sense is Second Life is now basically in maintenance mode, and that the user base shouldn't expect any major innovations that might drastically impact the existing ecosystem or hurt the world's steady profit, now that it's going directly into the hands of a massive holding company.

Anyway, the ironic thing about all these recent technical shortfalls is that they're happening after the completion of moving SL to the Amazon web cloud, dubbed "Uplift" -- perhaps the last major innovation to the platform.  As reader Sally Crofton notes:

Second Life Wesbite Traffic Down Nearly 50% Since 2018, According to SimilarWeb, Likely Reflecting Strong Decline in New User Sign-Ups

Surprising stats from SimilarWeb, especially given recent Linden Lab reports that Second Life was enjoying a quarantine upsurge:

• This February, SecondLife.com earned 9.4 million visits, and in the five months prior to that, peaked at 12.7 million visits in December 2020, and averaged visits in the 11 million+ range in other months. 
• In December 2018, however, monthly visits to the site were nearly 21 million, and earned similar traffic numbers in the previous five months.
• As a more distant comparison point: In 2014, SecondLife.com was averaging monthly visits in the 16 million range.

Unlike other social virtual worlds, most of which have a mobile app and/or run on consoles and/or Steam, Second Life is still heavily dependent on its website for shopping, account management, community activity, and -- perhaps most notably -- new user sign-ups. So web traffic on the official site provides a pretty strong indicator of overall user activity, including new users.

This doesn't, however, necessarily mean in-world user activity is also down:

Catwa Head Mob Crush Perfectly Encapsulates Current State of Second Life (Comments of the Week)

Photo of Catwa sale mob crush by SL blogger Kirsten Corleone; large version is not worksafe.

The L$1 sale of Catwa avatar heads caused the Marketplace website to crash due to heavy demand, provoking Linden Lab to remove the item from the store, and instead, make it available in-world on several sims... which also overloaded with head-hungry shoppers (see pic at right). All this happened while Linden Lab advertised a search for an engineer who could help craft the virtual world's future -- and that irony was not lost on some New World Notes readers:

Crashing Marketplace over a L$1 Mesh head is cause to weep for all of the [SL users] who have taken over Your World, Your Imagination. Not having that mesh head is the first step in having a head of your own. Stop the madness.

-- Clara Seller 

I think Clara's arguing as others have, that mesh has made Second Life a consumer-focused world. To be sure, there have always been sim-crashing shopping crazes, but in older times, there would also be massively popular arts and culture events across the virtual world at the same time -- but now those are far and few.

The laggy in-world mob crash also shows the limits of the Amazon cloud migration's ability to improve performance (though it definitely has improved) and points to the fundamental problems with legacy code:

Linden Lab Hiring VP of Engineering to Help Define Future of Second Life

While Second Life users scramble to buy a L$1 Catwa avatar head after the Marketplace website crashed due to heavy demand, Linden Lab is scrambling to find someone to plan the technical side of Second Life's future as a product. Seriously:

VP of Engineering:  You will work in conjunction with the leadership team to jointly develop and vet Linden Lab’s long-term technology strategy.

Responsibilities:

- Own and manage the architectural roadmap, setting the vision and strategy for technology, and distilling it into successfully releasing the product on time

- Work closely with VP of Product, VP of Product Ops, and VP of Marketing to define strategic future of Second Life

Much more here. Job requirements do not once mention mobile, iOS, Android, streaming, or games, which makes me a bit concerned about the strategic future of Second Life. But then again, seeing as Linden Lab's CEO told me about a mobile "companion app" for Second Life, a streaming option, and game mechanics back literally two years ago and nothing's transpired on those topics since, maybe they're no longer part of that strategic future?

But hey, look at all those Catwa heads!

Can Second Life Ever Grow Again? A Veteran Game Designer Has Some Very Good Insights

Pictured: Alexia in High Fidelity (as a cloud)

Rather than write yet again about what went wrong with Second Life way back when, I recently asked veteran game designer Alexia Mandeville what could go still go right.

She's in a very good position to offer her perspective: An SL user herself back in the day, she's now a designer at Niantic (creator of Pokémon GO, the massive AR-based virtual world), and a designer on the early iteration of Horizon, Facebook's social VR world. Even more pertinent, she was also a UX designer at High Fidelity, Philip Rosedale's follow-up virtual world to Second Life. She sees a shared corporate culture to that startup and SL developer Linden Lab, which has hampered consumer adoption of both their virtual worlds:

"[A]cquisition was never a strength at these places," as she puts it. "You need a strong aesthetic style (Minecraft/Roblox/Fortnite) and the ability to communicate your use case articulately to attract mainstream people."

So what are her recommendations to Linden Lab, to grow the Second Life userbase when so many previous attempts by the company have failed?

Ms. Mandeville makes four key suggestions:

Where Did Linden Lab Go Wrong With Second Life? (Comment of the Week)

Pictured: Official 2009 commercial for Second Life which very briefly shows the in-world creation tools in the background only once -- and doesn't mention them at all in the captions

Reader "Pulsar" posted a comment last week that touches on one of Silicon Valley's greatest mysteries that fascinates me to this day: How did Second Life, which received massive mainstream media coverage from 2006-2008, even showing up in several popular TV shows and movies, still steadfastly refuse to grow much beyond its existing userbase of some 600,000? Pulsar's answer:

Farewell to Oz: Linden Lab's Open Source Director Retires, Leaving Position's Fate Unknown -- And Hole in Second Life Community's Heart

Emphasizing that his upcoming departure from Linden Lab "has nothing at all to do with the change in ownership of the Lab" (the long-running startup was recently sold to the Waterford Group holding company), the veteran technologist Scott Lawrence, known by tens of thousands of SL users by his avatar name, "Oz Linden", just posted a retirement notice to the Second Life user community:

New Second Life Surnames Released, So If You Want an Avatar Named Going Incognito, Twisted Knickers, Kitten Caboose, Crabhead Nebula, or Even That's Amore... Now's Your Chance

... because Linden Lab just announced new last name options (above). Whoever gets to be That's Amore gets their own damn theme song:

Second Life Officially Acquired by Holding Company, Ending Era as Aspirational Startup

2021 starts with an ending of some kind, as briefly mentioned at the tail end of a New Year announcement on from Second Life management:

Another noteworthy development for the new year is that Linden Lab has new owners! As announced in mid-2020, an investment group led by Randy Waterfield and Brad Oberwager signed an agreement to acquire the company subject to regulatory approval by financial regulators in the U.S. related to Tilia Inc.’s status as a licensed money transmitter as well as other customary closing conditions. We are pleased to share that the regulatory review has been completed and Linden Lab is now under new ownership. 

Specifically Linden Lab is now officially owned by the Waterfield Group, which buys companies that make a decent profit and helps keep them profitable. Second Life is even listed on Waterfield's homepage as a network property (screengrabbed above), alongside a host of obscure/semi-obscure firms. (And, surprisingly, Goldman Sachs.)

And as the author of The Making of Second Life, I have to admit that this is not at all a future I saw for the virtual world. Twelve years ago, insiders (including myself) fully expected Second Life to enjoy a successful IPO, or perhaps as likely, to get acquired by a major company like Microsoft or Electronic Arts. Around that time, we saw Second Life becoming an integral part of the Internet's next generation, transforming multiple industries and mainstream culture itself, with Linden Dollars even becoming the world's most used electronic currency. Now, instead, it's listed as a portfolio holding beneath software companies specializing in contact center technologies and strategic solutions (Digital Data Voice Corporation) and cloud-based oil and gas software (NeoFirma).

It's an ironic end, but I don't mean to be completely downbeat: While Second Life didn't turn out to be the next generation of the Internet, it did pioneer the path for the many next generation virtual worlds that do stand a chance of becoming just that, and will continue being an inspiration for that goal. 

Anyway, what's all this mean for the average Second Life user?

In the short term, likely nothing -- for good and bad. As the announcement insists: