New World Notes

Linden Lab Hiring Senior Product Manager of Second Life to Shape the Original Metaverse's Future for "Millions of Customers"

Linden Lab has a new job opening that's been up on the website for at least the last several weeks:

Senior Product Manager at Linden Lab

We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager (remote) to elevate multiple facets of our Second Life product. This person would also enable growth and scale by shipping features that improve our customer experience... 

As a Senior Product Manager, you’ll utilize in-depth product knowledge to successfully drive key projects on Second Life. You’ll work alongside a supportive team of people across engineering, design, QA, and other cross-functional teams to build products and new experiences and play a pivotal role in shaping the future of the original metaverse. And finally, the pleasure of seeing your solutions ship, scale, and make a measurable impact on millions of customers' lives across the globe.

Emphasis mine! I've been hoping that the recently unveiled mobile version of Second Life would not simply be an app that targeted existing users, but instead aim to grow the audience well beyond the core established user base of 500,000-600,000. This new job listing seems like a solid indicator that Linden Lab is indeed attempting to grow the Second Life community, building off the momentum of the mobile app after that's launched (late this year/early next).

I can't emphasize how important a mobile app is, even for long-running metaverse platforms like Second Life:

Like I wrote in 2020, IMVU floundered for years as an also-ran competitor to Second Life; after it rolled out a mobile version, here's what happened:

Second Life Finally Adds New Mesh-Based Avatars & Fun Web-Based Setup Experience for First-Time Users -- But Lack of Non-Human Options is a Serious Mistake

This has been hinted at for months and even accidentally popped up on the test grid recently, but Linden Lab finally launched new starting mesh-based avatars and a "customize your new avatar" mini-game-type experience (similar to what you get at the start of The Sims franchise) for new users right on the homepage:

We're excited to announce the launch of our new Starter Avatars! These avatars, called Senra, are a fresh mesh take on the classic Second Life avatar, with a customizable modern and stylish look. These avatars will give new residents the opportunity to get started with a mesh body and personalize their own unique look the very first time they log in to Second Life and get a taste for the endless possibilities of avatar customization available to SL Residents.

Go here to join.secondlife.com to try it yourself. You'll probably want to use a different browser than what you normally employ for logging into Second Life's website. These are very rudimentary avatars, so longtimers may understandably squawk, but the great thing is this gently leads new SL users into the virtual world in a way that's, you know, fun.

Some other thoughts:

• It's optimized for mobile! That alone is a huge leap forward for the first-time user experience.
• Since these avatars come with a dev kit, expect a new burst of avatar fashion items in what's been a pretty static economy dominated by 2-3 mesh body giants.
• There's a serious lack of non-human, non-standard avatars. This really conveys a false impression of the varieties of expression that Second Life makes possible -- and will further distort the virtual world's culture around a "Malibu lifestyle" aesthetic. (See below.)

See my Starting Avatar avatar below:

Why: Why Second Life Needs a Better Presentation & Starting Setpiece

Here's a good video from longtime gaming/SL YouTuber Luca, who is demonstrably more passionate about improving Second Life than most people at Linden Lab. In it, Luca basically argues that Second Life can and should modernize its presentation and first-time user experience so it appeals to current gamers, and add a great opening setpiece -- i.e. a dramatic, exciting experience that gets these starting users interested in finding out more about the world and how to use it. 

"Setpieces matter," as Luca puts it to me now. "They set the tone and perception of how modern or ahead something is more than words can do." (I said something similar about the opening setpiece to Scavengers, which a Linden vet helped create.)

"Other platforms are increasingly filling the shoes of dedicated social virtual worlds," Luca goes on, "and many that are not inherently social are adding more social features. Second Life's uniqueness in term of individual features is diminishing rapidly but it is still very unique as a whole, we just need to up our game in how we communicate that uniqueness and unique selling proposition." 

This is all true. As an example of what current games are doing, Luca includes some screengrabs from Cyberpunk 2077 and Star Citizen, the MMO with a passionate following. But that's not to suggest Luca's suggesting Second Life look like Star Citizen per se:

Here's How Second Life's New iOS App Could Bring In a New Generation of Mobile Users

Pictured: Pocket Metaverse, a third party iOS app for accessing select Second Life features from 2010

With the iOS app for Second Life coming soon, reader and blogger Devin Vaughn sketches out a fascinating vision for how it could transform the virtual world. While the app itself is launching with very limited features (the late-lamented Pocket Metaverse from over a decade ago was actually more robust), Devin sees a chance to bring in a new wave of mobile users:

[I]t might be a sneak peek into Linden Lab's strategy of bridging SL and SL Mobile. This is baby steps for now, it takes time to develop code and app. But I could see it working that there are SL mobile-only sims that enforce both avatar and environment efficiency.

Imagine this: You want to 3D chat live on the phone with your friends? Teleport to SL Mobile Island 1. Oops, you are not allowed because your avatar is bonkers heavy with scripts and complexity. BUT you forgot to switch to your mobile, low lag, fast avatar first. So you just go to appearance, change outfit, and teleport is accepted. You land in a beautifully crafted environment, perhaps created by a well known genius designer who excels at kickass and fast. Much good time is had!

.....And later, you want to meet up with your special friend after work in the posh main grid where you wear as much scripts and fancy mesh as you want, or decorate to max, because the maingrid is still the wild wild west of freedom and zero enforced avatar or sim limits (if you don't mind the lag).

VRChat actually does something like this, for users of the Oculus Quest, enabling them to teleport to worlds that have been optimized to run on the Quest. That way, VRC users are able invite their Quest-owning friends into the "kiddie pool" of VRChat. (That's how I first got to meet Syrmor in VRChat!)

"Imagine if SL had mobile-only sims for mobile style avatars," Devin muses:

Dual Universe Already Has At Least One Embedded Reporter on YouTube

"This month has been great... if you're a shady individual of questionable morality." So begins the latest report from Charlie Traveler, reporter for Dual Universe Stellar Transmissions from the Dark Star Imperium clans... which is also the latest sign that a rich user community and culture is emerging in Dual Universe, the highly-ambitious, single-shard metaverse MMO we write about often here: That's right, since its launch last September, Dual Universe already has at least one embedded journalist. The news stories themselves are full of corporate vs. corporate intrigue reminiscent of Eve Online but on a grander scale.  Of course I personally think an embedded reporter is the best sign of a virtual world's future, but then I'm somewhat biased.

"We were inspired off of a need to catalogue the history of the game," the Dark Star team leader tells me via YouTube, explaining the channel's inspiration and news-gathering approach. "[I]f we did not do this then the interactions and happenings in the community would fade into obscurity, with many people never being able to ever know things had happened. We gather things through a mix of people being able to self report and tip us off on things anonymously, as well as having reporters who crawl and aggregate information throughout the community."

Also interesting to me (and this might be a sign of slow user growth): Mr. Traveler reports the top ten player organizations by user numbers, and they're all in the low four to mid three figures. Which suggests Dual Universe's active userbase is probably in the low mid figures? 

More Dual Universe stories below:

The Question About Second Life That Linden Lab Has Yet to Answer

Pictured: The Hilarious Hell Of The Second Life Noob Experience

Linden Lab answered nearly every reader question in response to my Ebbe Altberg interview recently, but there's one last follow-up to those follow-ups that they have yet to address:

Any plans for redoing the Viewer?

We are constantly revising, updating, and fixing the Viewer as with the rest of Second Life. There are no plans currently for a complete overhaul of the Viewer.

My question to that reply:

If You Think an Achievement System is Incompatible With Second Life, You Don't Remember How Second Life Started

Second Life's homepage from 2004, via Archive.org

"How to Save Second Life in Seven Easy Steps" is my latest editorial on Social Times, and I'm gratified to see it garnering a very interesting conversation there. The most curious reaction, of course, is to my suggestion to add an achievement/leveling system to Second Life, primarily to give new users a structure that will ease them into the SL experience in an encouraging and fun way. Sample objections: "That will just make Second Life like World of Warcraft!", or "I don't want SL to become FarmVille!" At heart to these objections is the assumption that a leveling system is fundamentally incompatible with Second Life, which is such an ahistorical notion, it's worth addressing here.

In point of fact, before World of Warcraft launched and FarmVille existed, Second Life did have a leveling system, and had one from very earliest days.

How to Make Second Life Mass Market: A Destination Guide to Others Online (Not Pretty Places Probably Unpopulated)

Every day, thousands of people try Second Life, but only a fraction of them become regular returning users. There's probably a number of reasons that 95% or so of those newbies leave, but what's the main factor that keeps those few retained? In an important study from two academics from the University of Michigan, which Grace McDunnough brilliantly blogs about here, chat is the primary predictive factor. Not making money, not creating content, not exploring the world per se, but active chat -- the number of fellow Residents a new user talked with, over a longer period of time. This is probably the simplest form of user-to-user interaction in Second Life, but as it turns out, it generates the best retention rates.

The problem, as Grace goes on to point out, is the Second Life interface as it currently exists makes finding people online to chat with extremely difficult and time-consuming. (This is likely why searching the dynamic map for the green dots of online users has become the preferred workaround solution, but not an ideal one for numerous reasons.) The viewer's "Destination Guide" will take new users to beautifully created places in Second Life, but owing to the world's architecture, it's likely they will meet few if anyone there.

How to encourage new users to chat? Fortunately, there's an easy and already proven solution, and it looks like this:

Forrester Analyst Suggests Second Life Stymied by "Iron Law of Oligarchy" - He's Half Right

At the last Second Life Community Convention, Chief Product Officer T. Linden gave a milestone presentation on the new SL viewer, aimed at making the Second Life experience more intuitive and user-friendly. Created by veterans of Adobe, TiVO, and other companies renowned for great UI design, it was an impressive and exciting unveiling.

And then T. opened his talk for audience questions. First one had nothing to do with the viewer. Instead, a gentleman demanded angrily, "When are you going to make it possible for us to belong to more than twenty groups in Second Life?" (Or words to that effect.) The rest of the questions for T. from SLCC attendees were largely in that vein, highly detailed concerns about outstanding bugs and features, which while important and valid, had little or nothing to do with the new Second Life viewer.

Tom Grant, analyst with the esteemed Forester Research firm, has a thought-provoking post which provides a name for this phenomenon, and suggests it's holding Second Life back:

[T]he Iron Law of Oligarchy, a small and often unrepresentative sample of users [who] wield disproportionate influence over the vendor's thinking about products and services... Second Life is an extreme case of how you can develop a very happy group of customers, and still fail miserably at reaching a wider audience. Some businesses are comfortable with that outcome, as long as the customer base stays loyal, and the business stays profitable. Most would be terrified to discover that their best customers are, in subtle ways, holding them back. I can't say for sure that the Second Life notables are the reason why the UI is still klunky, and the useful content is hard to find, but I definitely have my suspicions.

As the incident at SLCC suggests, there is some truth to that observation. I've seen a similar phenomena on this blog, in many of the responses to my editorial series on making Second Life more mass market:

How To Make Second Life Truly Mass Market, Part 4: Become Cheap, Easy, and Always Available

The New York Times magazine's annual must-read "Year in Ideas" issue published yesterday includes an entry which quickly distilled to its essence what I've been trying to express in my "How to Make Second Life Mass Market" series of posts. Put much more succinctly:

"Good Enough is the New Great"

This adage summarizes a recent Wired magazine article by Robert Capps, "The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine", which I recommend highly. In it, Capps identifies a pervasive market trend that encompasses everything from consumer technology to military hardware: when given the option, the market overwhelmingly favors the lower quality option that's cheap and available, over the product that's expensive but much higher quality and feature-robust. It's why consumers generally prefer the Flip camera over high definition video cameras, Google Docs over Microsoft Office, and so on. (I'm sure you can quickly think of other examples; I'm hard pressed to come up with even one where the rule clearly doesn't apply.)

The same phenomenon is observable with virtual worlds: