New World Notes

Monday Memory: My 2014 Interview With the Late Ebbe Altberg After He Became CEO of Linden Lab

With the Second Life community and the wider industry still processing the passing of Ebbe Altberg, I went back to read my first interview with him in 2014, shortly after he became Linden Lab's CEO. It's particularly moving how he discovered the virtual world through his son:

Though he is Linden Lab’s new CEO now, one of Ebbe Altberg’s first experiences with Second Life occurred over 10 years ago, and as it happens, actually involved a violation of Second Life policy. It was around that time, you see, that Altberg’s son fell in love with Second Life, and became an avid builder there. Which is usually a fine thing, but here’s the problem: Altberg’s son was a young teen at the time, and back then they were strictly not allowed:

“So yeah, he was underage,” Altberg admits now, “so SL booted him correctly.”

Altberg convinced then CEO Philip Rosedale to be lenient, but by that time, Altberg’s young son had become a well-known content creator in Second Life... Despite all that, Ebbe's son stayed engaged in Second Life for a couple years, and even co-founded an in-world design company. And being among the first explorers of Teen Second Life, one of that world’s original islands was even named after the avatar of Ebbe Altberg’s son. And Ebbe Altberg watched all this amazed: “For a kid to have this experience so early was fantastic,” as he puts it now.

Another interesting point is how he saw VR/XR devices as a potential savior to Second Life's waning  user/revenue growth:

Ebbe Altberg, Ambitious & Inspiring CEO of Linden Lab, Dies After Long Bout With Illness -- MULTIPLE UPDATES: Added Personal Tributes from Philip Rosedale, Blueberry & Strawberry Linden, His Moral Leadership & How He Discovered Second Life Through His Son

Here's an announcement from Linden Lab that I've been dreading to write about for over two years:

Ebbe Altberg started with Linden Lab as our CEO on February 5th, 2014.  He took the helm of the company and immediately went to work on reinvigorating our spirit and culture.  Ebbe brought a profound openness, and transparency in his operation which was key and that had many effects on all of us internally, and externally.  Lindens were encouraged to be part of the vibrant community in Second Life, to participate in and to cherish it as part of our daily duties... As I am here before you today, it is with profound sadness that I share with you Ebbe passed away yesterday evening restfully and surrounded by the love of his family. 

What this means for the future of Second Life, recently purchased by a massive holding company, is a conversation for next week. What I'd rather do now is talk about Ebbe, who in my opinion was the most ambitious and inspiring CEOs of Linden Lab since Philip Rosedale himself. He galvanized the community and the company around a new vision to energize virtual worlds, and boosted company morale beaten badly by lack of revenue growth, layoffs, and the entrance and quick exit of two CEOs before him. (It's why the company made T-shirts for employees emblazoned with Ebbe's immortal words, "We are still the shit when it comes to virtual worlds.")

Also worth noting that Ebbe guided the company through rough waters while dealing with his illness since at least 2019:

Second Life Homepage Updated (And Vastly Improved) With Mixed Reality Video

Remember Second Life's odd new homepage that debuted last month, inexplicably featuring a real life model depicting an elf? If you go to the homepage now without logging in, you'll see it's been updated with a minute+ video that still includes that RL model, but now, also her SL analog (above). The video also depicts several RL models "becoming" their avatars -- a pretty good way of depicting one core feature of Second Life. (I'm still perplexed by the RL teaser last month, but let that go.)

I'm also glad to see so much emphasis on the new tagline -- "Explore. Discover. Create." -- which is also not bad for a tagline, even if it doesn't convey the full platform's potential. (What happened to "Play" and "Socialize"?) And the new video, while a big improvement, still doesn't actually depict the Create piece. How do you appeal to all the creators in, say, ROBLOX, who are reaching their early twenties and are potentially interested in a virtual world targeted at non-teens that offers a better revenue deal than ROBLOX's 50/50 split?  The video itself also seems rather dark (both visually and thematically) and a bit too self-serious for a virtual world popular with tinies and virtual Kim Kardashians.

Anyway, more screengrabs from the video below, which oddly isn't on the official YouTube channel yet... but maybe it'll debut as an actual ad on TV first?

Second Life Unveils Strange New Homepage Featuring Real Life Model, Other Odd Non-Second Life Marketing

Either this is a belated April Fool's joke, or this is the new official homepage for Second Life. Which is an online virtual world with 3D graphics, but for some reason, now features not an avatar, but a real life model.

Yes, really: The flying elf is from an upcoming promo that Linden Lab teased late last year (watch below), featuring many more non-avatar models pretending to be avatars. Suggesting an implicit marketing pitch on the order of, I guess, "Sign up for Second Life so you can be a flying elf... but not the one here, as she's not 3D graphics, but you'll feel like this in your mind."

The explicit messaging on the new homepage also feels as if it emanated from a marketing company with no actual first-hand knowledge of Second Life, or virtual worlds in general:

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: