New World Notes

BREAKING: Bonnie Bots Team Meets With Linden Lab, Promises Opt-Out & Masking Features for Second Life Users

Above: Patch Linden (speaking) with some of the Bonnie Bots dev team (photo courtesy Bonnie Belle)

 

Most everyone involved with Second Life has been avidly talking for days about BonnieBots, a new website tracking genuine Second Life activity, with many SLers enthusing over the depth and value of this data, and others alleging rampant privacy intrusions. (Examples in comments here, and also here.)

 

This morning, it was Linden Lab's turn to talk: Patch Linden, VP of Product Operations, summoned Bonnie and her team* into Second Life itself for a fireside meeting.  After a reportedly pleasant chat, Bonnie tells me the site will be making some crucial changes:

 

How to Improve Second Life New User Retention: Reader Recommendations

Whoever Linden Lab hires to fix its first-time user experience, they may want to take a look at what New World Notes readers recommend:

Optimize the first-time orientation for low-end computers. Ideally it should look halfway decent on even a PC/Mac laptop with no 3D card. More from Yves Firlan:

Update the default settings so any system they might have runs halfway stable with decent graphics after installing the viewer for the first time (like: did they ever change the default setting for bandwidth from 500 to 950/1000 which is one of the main reasons things rez frustratingly slow for Newbies?)

Immediately connect new users with affinity groups:

I don’t think there is a single new user experience in the history of Second Life’s carrier that prompts you to join groups you may be interested in. Such a no brainer for social. -- Adeon Writer

[I]t's astounding Linden Lab never figured that one out. To take it further, groups need to be improved. (Or maybe we need a feature separate from groups that can act more as a social hub, as current groups are tied to land ownership and other features that limit how many groups we can have, cause group chat issues, etc.) -- Penny

Yes, exactly. I'd go so far as to say new users should be able to choose groups on the webpage sign-up.

A couple more important recommendations:

Linden Lab Hiring Senior Product Manager to Improve First-Time User Experience -- Here's Who I'd Recruit

Here's an ideal job offer for a UX designer/product manager who is up for the challenge of accomplishing a task that hasn't been solved in near 20 years*: Improving Second Life's first-time user experience so it drives retention.

Tasks include:

Overseeing, planning and execution of projects: production schedules, resourcing, and quality assurance against quantifiable goals. Immerse yourself in Second Life to attain a deep understanding of the feature set and use cases and learn the culture by getting to know the user community.

Promotion of the value of core experience of Second Life to other parts of Linden Lab, and help ensure Product leverages the ideas and resources of the larger organization.

The wording above makes me nervous, because it implies they're not looking for someone who already has a deep understanding of Second Life. Linden Lab once had dozens of people recruited from the SL user community, but that's since dwindled to a handful.

Anyway, I believe the ideal hire has both experience in Second Life and other virtual worlds:

Second Life User Creators Were Paid Out $86 Million in 2021! That's Decent Growth & Compares Well To Metaverse Leader Roblox

When I blogged about J.P. Morgan investing in Linden Lab payments spinoff Tilia last week, I missed this point from Forbes columnist and longtime Metaverse expert Charlie Fink:

Tilia is easy for developers to implement, and it’s simple and convenient for their customers to use. Transactions are instant and cost pennies, some of which go into the developer’s pocket. At Second Life, those pennies amounted to $86M last year.

Emphasis mine, because wow. I checked this with company spokesman Brett Linden who clarified that this $86 million is "the amount that was paid out to creators in 2021."

Yes: Second Life's content creator community earned $86 million from their virtual content last year.

This is notable for at least a couple reasons:

Linden Lab Payment Spinoff Tilia Gets Strategic Investment from Finance Giant J.P. Morgan

What if after everything, Second Life is largely remembered in the business world as creating a payment processor for the metaverse platforms of tomorrow? Because that may become a thing:

Tilia LLC, the all-in-one payments platform, today announced it has secured a strategic investment from J.P. Morgan Payments. Tilia’s solution, built for game, virtual world and mobile application developers handles payment processing, in-game transactions, as well as payouts to creators by converting in-world tokens to fiat currency including USD, which serves as the backbone of any functioning virtual economy...

Tilia’s virtual payment system easily and securely converts in-game tokens and currency into fiat currency.  Built from the ground up to power Second Life and its creator-based economy, Tilia was developed over several years to build its unique capabilities. Tilia has secured the required money transmitter licenses in the U.S. to support payouts, allowing for secure transactions on a large scale. 

Finance giants like J.P. Morgan make strategic investments like this on the expectation they'll be accessing a larger market down the road, i.e. burgeoning metaverse platforms with less experience than Linden Lab handling international payments/virtual currency.

Why Second Life Hit a Growth Plateau -- Founding CTO Cory Ondrejka on Team Turnover & the Innovator's Dilemma

Reflecting on the Wall Street Journal's podcast series on the rise and fall (and rise) of Second Life, along with my own chats with him for the upcoming book, Second Life's founding CTO Cory Ondrejka recently posted a thoughtful analysis on the topic in social media. With his permission, here it is in full, reflecting his breadth of knowledge on the subject and the industry as a whole. (Cory is now technical advisor to Google's CEO.)

Between The Journal, talking to Wagner James Au, and the general noise around metaverse-y stuff, lots of discussion about why Second Life has been unable to break out from the plateau of 15 years ago.

Everyone’s got opinions here — and I expect many of them are partially right — but perhaps it’s not that complicated.

If we start in 2007, SL is still growing but churn is making it clear that it’s a very challenging experience to really connect with, and tech limitations are hurting some of the most exciting use cases, but those who do navigate through the challenges keep showing there is something incredibly compelling about SL, about cocreation and shared experiences in places.

But then technology changed (iPhone and web supplanted native PC executables as primary product experiences for most people, SL was not well positioned to follow this pivot and the transition applied a second constraint on growth — beyond churn — impeding resources to support dramatic change).

Sometimes companies survive these transitions — Facebook with mobile, Intel with CPUs, Microsoft with cloud — but it’s never easy.

Plus Linden had two additional challenges:

BREAKING: Second Life Again Available on Browsers & Mobile... For Premium+ Subscribers; UPDATES: Added Pic of Current SL Streaming Experience

As teased back in July, Linden Lab just announced an option to access Second Life on a web browser and mobile devices for people willing to pay:

Second Life Premium Plus members already get many benefits that help them get the most out of Second Life…and now we’re partnering with SpeedLight to add even more value!

The Speedlight mobile app is already popular with many of our community members since it enables Residents to stay connected with Second Life while on the go, and now Premium Plus subscribers get access to additional Speedlight benefits: no online time limitations along with prioritised online support. Now you can enjoy Second Life on your mobile devices (or in a web browser) with the freedom to stay connected as long as you like! To get these benefits, all you need to do is access Second Life using SpeedLight with your Premium Plus account.

Premium Plus costs $25/month. When I surveyed readers in June, asking how many were interested in upgrading to that for added benefits, only 1 in 4 said yes. With a long-awaited mobile/browser option added to that mix, I suspect many more will upgrade.

I haven't yet tried Speedlight, by the way, but did help a company called OnLive launch a short-lived streaming option for Second Life in 2014. Back then, it cost $9.99 a month for unlimited use or metered service at $1 per hour.

So an unlimited streaming option via SpeedLight as another add-on to Premium Plus at $25/month is a pretty good deal.

As to whether you would like it, here's what it currently looks like running Second Life:

Linden Lab Buys User-Made Commerce System Too Valuable to the Second Life Community To Fail

Here's the latest lesson for metaverse platforms:

• If you give your user base incredibly powerful content creation and scripting systems, some of them will create in-world products and services that become so popular with the user community, they'll effectively become integral to the virtual world.* 
• That also means if these user creators were to suddenly quit (boredom, business, sudden death, etc), the entire virtual world economy will feel the shockwaves.
• So, congrats: Your user-made product or service is now an official part of the platform. Get out your checkbook.

Latest example just announced today: Linden Lab acquired Casper Tech, creator of various virtual world commerce services (rental systems, vendors, etc.), run by a mostly-anonymous Second Life user known by his avatar "Casper Warden". (Interview below.)

"My feeling is that this is a risk reduction move," longtime SLer Da5id Kronfeld observes. "So many people rely on Casper that the service suddenly vanishing represents a significant risk to the SL economy."

Variations of this have happened to Second Life before, with (for example) the L$ open exchange system and the SL Marketplace ecommerce website originally starting as user-made platforms.

"I suppose it shows they're still keen to keep Second Life going as a project if they're investing money in some aspects of it," Sler Natalie observes. (Then again, it's probably more cost effective to buy CasperTech rather than hiring 2-3 Linden Lab engineers to recreate its functionality.) Echoing other veterans, she suspects Linden Lab will adding extra costs to use CasperTech's tech: "I can see Caspervend being a subscription thing, maybe bundled into a Creators tier which would be Premium Plus AND Caspervend etc."

All that to one side, it seems like a necessary move (and much congrats to Casper). That said, it does feel like another duct tape fix on top another duct tape fix, with the Second Life platform kept online by successive layers of short-term hacks, since it would be too costly to do what's really necessary: Overhaul the entire thing.

On that front, very longtime Second Life user Allegory Malaprop has an excellent and salty rant:

Virtual Home Decor Ideas from an SL Blog Called... Clique This

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Less Is More is a recent post on Clique This. The title caught my eye first because often less is more, but we seldom see less in a SL decor post. Some rooms are very beautiful but it feels like there is no room for people in them. Not this room. It’s spare without a dozen things on th floor to trip over and to collect dust. I love th art on the wall and clean and simple furnishings. If I were to ever put a television in the bedroom, I guess I would like it in a shelving unit like this on, but I don’t think I would ever want a TV in the bedroom. That’s where I read! 

• Bee Designs – Full Moon Bedroom
• InkMe – Aoki Living Room Set
• Mithral – Philodendron Melanochrysum
• Apple Fall – New York Studio Apartment

For something for the outdoors, click here:

When Second Life Goes Offline, Someone Wears Shrek Ears. Behind the Scenes at Linden Lab With Honeycomb CTO Charity Majors

Pictured: Ms. Majors near Linden Lab's erstwhile Brighton UK office. Yes, her shirt says "Will work for L$"

Charity Majors has an excellent blog post on creating culture and rituals within a tech company's engineering team, and knows whereof she writes. She's CTO and co-founder of Honeycomb, a leading observability provider -- I.E., The service your company uses if it has a highly complex computer network and you want to see in real time across the whole system what's working well and what's not. Charity cut her teeth at Linden Lab -- a company with an insanely, wackily complex computer network -- and shares some of the insider rituals that the Linden engineers practiced, to keep up morale and keep Second Life online and running as smoothly as (relatively) possible.

Which brings us to Shrek Ears:

SHREK EARS

We had a matted green felt headband with ogre ears on it, called the Shrek Ears. The first time an engineer broke production, they would put on the Ears for a day. This might sound unpleasant, like a dunce cap, but no — it was a rite of passage. It was a badge of honor! Everyone breaks production eventually, if they’re working on something meaningful.

If you were wearing the Shrek Ears, people would stop you throughout the day and excitedly ask what happened, and reminisce about the first time they broke production. It became a way for 1) new engineers to meet lots of their teammates, 2) to socialize lots of production wisdom and risk factors, and 3) to normalize the fact that yes, things break sometimes, and it’s okay — nobody is going to yell at you.

So that's an inside insight for Second Life users. Whenever the virtual world was offline or constantly crashing, chances are someone in San Francisco was wandering around the office with green felt ears on their head. Those ears were worn, Charity tells me, "[L]iterally every outage."

But it wasn't a mandatory hazing ritual, she quickly adds: "The spirit of it was always very light hearted and fun. It wasn't to shame people, it was to congratulate people. You took down production? Congratulations, you're finally one of us now. Our thesis was that if you never took down prod, you probably weren't moving fast enough or taking enough risks. (Second Life was a crazy complex distributed system, even by today's standards, at a time before devops or IaaC or any modern tooling. The world was much more fragile one.)" 

I remember Shrek Ears well, because wearing them began as a ritual during my own time at Linden Lab, from 2003-2006. In fact, they matriculated from the engineering team so that random people across the company would wear them after they goofed up in their own department. (I even put them on for awhile after I messed up a New World Notes detail, but I don't think anybody noticed.)

Speaking of Second Life downtimes, Charity told me about some major incidents from her time on the engineering team, from 2004-2010. Strap in, we're getting into the technical weeds, sharing a Shrek Ears photo, and talking about "Transactpocalypse" too: