SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

Linden Lab recently welcomed a new addition to its executive ranks: Kim Salzer, who became our Vice President of Marketing, at the beginning of August. Kim (known as Kim Linden inworld) joins us from Activision Blizzard, where she was Vice President of Global Brand Management for properties like Guitar Hero and Call of Duty 2, among others. Kim brings a deep background in gaming (including experience at Electronic Arts working on massively multiplayer online games and hit sports franchises), and in online learning, and we’re excited to have her as part of the team. As an introduction to Residents, I asked Kim to tell us a bit about herself in her own words:

Q: What’s the one thing you bring from the gaming world that will be most useful to you in your position at Linden Lab?

A: Working in gaming taught me a lot about just how creative and  passionate that audience can be, and I think the same is true for the  Residents of Second Life. And SL provides so many great tools to enhance  and bring out that creativity, I’m really looking forward to helping foster that as we move into the next phase of the platform’s growth. I  want to see if we can make the range of what’s possible in Second Life  even broader.

Q: What are your goals for your new position as VP Marketing at Linden Lab?

A:  What I really want to do here is help the Lab figure out what the “X  Factor” is going to be for Second Life. When I was working on games, I  always tried to choose a single idea to focus on and bring out, an X  Factor that helped people get into the game and helped them discover all  the rest of the possibilities there. If I can help bring that kind of  focus to Second Life, I’ll be happy about how I’m doing my job.

Q: What excites you most about working on a product like Second Life?

A: I’m excited about the prospect of helping to build a product that  really empowers people to express what they’re about, and that can make a real difference in their lives. I think we’ve only just started to see  what can be done here, and I can’t wait to see where we and our  Residents can take things from here.

After the flood of comments that greeted our announcement of the upcoming Display Names feature, we’re happy to announce that we are now releasing a Project Viewer to help us further test performance and let Residents get a sense for how Display Names would work should they go into production.

Once you download the Project Viewer, you’ll be able to freely change your Display Name via the Profile Pane of the right-hand sidebar. Once in production, Residents will be able change their Display Names no more than once per week, in order to cut down on the risk of impersonation. In the Project Viewer, however, there are no limits to how often your Display Name can change.

The Project Viewer will also let you see how names generally can be configured through your Preferences pane, where you can elect to see usernames as well as Display Names, or have your Second Life friends’ names show as a different color from other Residents. The release is hardwired to connect to a test grid, so that any changes you make there will have no impact on your main grid account.

As mentioned, reducing the risk of impersonation is one of our chief concerns as we roll out Display Names. Our original announcement had over a thousand comments, with myself and the team reading all of your feedback. Many of those comments touched on the danger of impersonation. We’re currently discussing the great ideas and constructive feedback you gave and we want to stress that we certainly recognise and share the concerns over impersonation. We’ll be talking more with you about those issues soon and if there are changes needed we will talk about what we are thinking.

We’d like as many of you as possible to try out the feature as it stands today and let us know how it feels. We’ll continue to gather feedback throughout, both in the comments thread below, and on a specific pjira VWR-21053.

Late last week, we discovered a denial-of-service attack that was being served through the widely distributed Emerald third-party viewer. This is in direct violation of our third-party viewer policy (part 2, section d, paragraph iii).

We have removed Emerald from the list of third-party viewers, and are now in touch with the Emerald team to discuss what can happen next. We did this to do our best to protect the safety and security of Second Life users. We will not tolerate a viewer that includes malicious code, nor will we tolerate development teams with a history of violating users’ trust or disrupting their lives.

We take privacy, safety, and security very seriously, and we will act to the best of our abilities to protect it. We have not yet disabled logins via the Emerald viewer, but will do so if we feel the software and the team behind it is not able to meet the standards we’ve set. While Emerald is currently the focus of our attention because of what happened recently, all third-party viewers are held to the same standard, and must comply with the third-party viewer policy.

The third-party viewer directory is designed to be largely self-policing, but we take our responsibility to act very seriously when problems come to our attention. Our goal is that you should feel comfortable using many different viewers in accessing Second Life. While there are always risks involved in using a third-party viewer, we are doing what we can to minimize those, and we encourage and deeply appreciate third-party development. Our new Snowstorm project is an example — allowing third-party developers to deliver more directly and rapidly to the Second Life viewer.

If you have been using the Emerald viewer, for now we would encourage you to consider either one of the Linden Lab viewers, or an alternative third-party viewer.

As Philip announced at SLCC, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue Teen Second Life as a standalone product and to lower the minimum age of Second Life Residents on the Main Grid to 16.  Teen Second Life will be closing on December 31, 2010, and we plan to begin accepting 16-year-old Residents to the Main Grid on or before that date.

In the five years since it opened, the Teen Grid has been a space of incredible creativity for teens and also home to a number of innovative educational projects. However, supporting and developing for two separate grids has been a challenge for us, and has slowed progress on improvements that benefit all Residents. To help us focus our resources and development on the Main Grid, we have made the difficult decision to close Teen Second Life.

Second Life has a lot to offer teens, and they clearly have a lot to offer Second Life. We are proud that Teen Second Life has had a genuine and  positive impact on teens’ lives — as a space for creative self-expression, as a tool helping innovative teachers make a difference, as a place for fun with friends, and more. We are also grateful for the contributions that Teen Second Life Residents and educators have made, and for the support they have provided to the greater Second Life community. Many Teen Grid Residents have gone on to become productive members of the Main Grid on reaching the age of 18.

The question of why all teens can’t enjoy the community and creativity that is present on the Main Grid has come up often in the last five years. Many teens want access to the rich experiences — the variety of content, the broader marketplace, and the chance to interact with parents and older friends — that the Main Grid affords. Parents and educators, as well, have often lamented the fact that they are unable to experience Second Life with their kids, or to hold classes serving a broader range of ages.

Lowering the minimum age of Second Life Residents to 16 is a first step toward this goal. As we progress with our plans to close Teen Second Life, we will be transferring 16 and 17 year old Teen Grid accounts, land, and content to the Main Grid. We are evaluating if there are ways to allow 13 -15 year olds to have safe access to limited locations on the Main Grid with appropriate controls at some point in the future. However, there is no guarantee that we will be able to do that, or when, as we weigh it against other company priorities at this point.

I will be talking to teens, parents, and educators about the needs of younger users and how we can work toward being able to serve them in  future. I’ll be setting up inworld meetings in the coming weeks to learn more about those needs, and potential short- and long-term solutions to meet them. I look forward to speaking with everyone, and listening to your feedback, thoughts, and suggestions.

For more details, see this wiki page, and stay tuned for further updates.

As Philip mentioned this weekend in his speech at SLCC,  I’m excited to tell you more about a new feature that’s on the horizon for Second Life. Known as Display Names, it’s a project that will not  only give Residents the tools to better express themselves, it will also help us grow the population of SL further, making it a richer and more  robust social environment for all. Most importantly, it brings a new element of creativity to your avatar, combining the ability to adopt  virtually any name you like in Second Life with the stability of having a  persistent underlying identity that lets everyone be sure at all times  which avatar they’re communicating and transacting with.

In a nutshell, Display Names, set to roll out in a project release at the end of August and be deployed gridwide in late September, gives Residents two aspects to their identity in Second Life: a username that  is unique and does not change, and an optional Display Name you can change periodically and can be set to nearly anything you like — including foreign Unicode characters, more than two words, and many other possibilities. The change means that Residents are no longer  forced to choose from a limited set of last names (which has scared off new users in the past), and makes it possible to use your Second Life name as a more powerful and expressive aspect of your online self. Whether you use your current SL name, your real name, a pseudonym, gamer tag or other ID, Display Names gives you more freedom to express your identity inworld — not just in avatar form, but in name as well.

Why Display Names?

Moving to a system of usernames and  Display Names has a number of advantages. Above and beyond the greater  self-expression it allows, Display Names also relieves new Residents of  the need to choose a Second Life last name. New users signing up for  Second Life often abandon their accounts when they’re asked to choose from a list of last names; Display Names removes this choice from  registration and lets them get into Second Life more quickly.

Display Names also supports European, Asian, and other Unicode characters — an  important feature for our international Residents (who currently  account for about 60% of the SL community). For years, Residents have requested this capability and we are excited now to be able to share what’s coming.

Display Names lets us provide more choice and at the same time provides a  consistent and unique identity for individual avatars. While you may  change your Display Name from time to time, the username associated with each account doesn’t change, and will always be easily discoverable by anyone dealing with a  particular Resident. That means there should never be a question over  who you’re talking to inworld.

Endless Possibilities

Display  Names gives you more freedom than ever to express your inworld  identity. You can use your real name, a fantasy name, hyphenate with  your inworld partner, promote your organization or inworld business name, or anything that you want other Residents to refer to you as. Torley Linden has created the video below that will give you an idea of  what you can do with this new feature:

More Information

We will continue to update you as we roll Display Names out. In the meantime, here’s where you can learn more and share your thoughts.

• Read our Frequently Asked Questions complete with helpful images
  
• Share your thoughts on Twitter: #slviewer2

Where We’ve Been

Almost two years ago, we set about revamping the Second Life Viewer and in March of this year we released Viewer 2. Over that two year period, we took a heads-down approach to our design and development process to create a Viewer that would be easier for new Residents to use. This heads-down approach meant we had very limited contact with you, and left many Residents feeling alienated. Now, we are making some big changes to better communicate with you and include you in our development process. Specifically, we’re beginning a new open-source program — known as Project Snowstorm — that will show you exactly what we’re working on and will also start to bring Resident contributions into our mainline Viewer build. We’re extremely excited to be firing up this program, and we’re confident it will lead to a better Viewer, one that benefits from the tremendous talent and creativity we’ve seen from the most committed members of our development community.

Fast, Easy, Fun!

As part of Linden Lab’s recent reorganization, we’ve taken a hard look at the way work together, the way we build software, and the way we interact with the open-source community. We’ve got a lot of improvements we want to make to the Viewer 2 user experience. Some of the Viewer’s workflows that are cumbersome for some Residents and this has hurt Viewer adoption. We really can improve the Second Life user experience by rethinking the way our Viewer works and making it (and its features and functionality) faster, easier, and more fun for everyone. But we can’t do it without your help.

Where We’re Headed - Project Snowstorm

As we prepare to make Viewer 2.1.1 the mainline release, I’m really excited to share introduce you to Project Snowstorm and the Snowstorm team who will be working on the Second Life Viewer in the open and in way that directly engages you.

Here are our goals:

Show Residents continuous visible progress

• Work in the open by sharing not only our code, but our process publicly — this includes our backlog and our discussion about it.
• Engage with the open source community and aggressively accept contributions from the community into the Second Life Viewer.
• Release new ‘Development’ Viewers frequently — our initial target is bi-weekly.  All builds from the ‘Development’ branch are visible and available for testing.

Improve the user experience 

• Make continuous improvements to the design and implementation of the Viewer’s user interface.
• Import desirable patches and features from Snowglobe and other Third Party Viewers.
• Add small features and fixes that have high value and low cost, while still remaining consistent with an overall product vision.

Renew and deepen our relationship with the community

• Integrate community work directly into the main Viewer rather than routing it through Snowglobe first.
• Demonstrate rapid responsiveness to feedback and patches from community.
• Engage continuously with the community to develop new project proposals and provide resources that open source developers need to be effective.

I should note that it’s not just the Snowstorm team who are working on the Viewer. Several teams throughout the Lab are contributing features and bug fixes to the Viewer — those teams will also be moving to a model where we work more closely with our Residents. The Snowstorm team will be focused on rapid iteration and constant improvement, while working closely with the open source community and sharing everything we do.

How’s that going to work, Esbee?

I’m glad you asked! Linden Lab has adopted the Scrum framework as a way of allowing our teams to work quickly and feeling empowered to introduce new features and functionality to Second Life.

At the heart of our process is the Snowstorm Team Backlog. This is a ranked list of user stories that describe things we’d like to do with Viewer 2. Every team at Linden Lab has a backlog like this and ours will be visible to you. If you look at the list and think of something you’d like to suggest we add, change, or just have questions, please let me know!

As a team, we’ll be gathering every two weeks to pick items off our Backlog to work in our next Sprint. A sprint is a development cycle where teams create tasks to fulfill a series of user stories and work to design, implement, and test those stories during that cycle. Snowstorm Team sprints will last two weeks. Each day, the team will gather inworld for a Daily Scrum, where each team member will give a short (2 minute) status update. We’ll publish that status update on the Wiki after our Daily Scrum as well.

We’ll also be encouraging open source developers to work with us on Backlog items - or you’re welcome to propose ideas too! Oz Linden will be posting information about how to propose project ideas on the Wiki. Open source developers will be treated as any other team member and invited to our Daily Scrum to share their status as well.

As the Snowstorm team works with you to make changes to the Second Life Viewer with a focus on improving overall user experience, teams in the Lab will also be working on the Viewer. We’ll be sharing our Viewer Roadmap shortly so you can get an idea of all the work being considered for the Viewer this year, not just from the Snowstorm Team.

The Snowstorm team will be blogging at least weekly about their work, sharing their successes, failures, challenges, and ideas with you. We’ll be holding public meetings, sharing our design ideas, and all documentation.

Who’s on the Snowstorm Team?

As I mention above many teams across the Lab are working on the Viewer. The Snowstorm team will be managing the Development branch, coordinating contributions from the open source community, and will also contribute rapid feature development.

The team consists of:

• Q Linden - Tech Lead, Team Lead
• Esbee Linden - Product Lead, Business Lead
• Oz Linden - Open Source Lead
• Merov, Aimee, Tofu, Paul, Andrew,Vadim, Anya - Engineers
• Open Source Community

Where can I learn more?

Snowstorm operates in the open; the home page of the Snowstorm team is on the Snowstorm Wiki page. It has pointers to our various communication channels, processes, and contact information.

The Snowstorm Team presented at the Second Life Community Convention on Aug 15. You can watch the recorded presentation, here.

Let us know what you think!

Do you have questions about what we’re doing, where we’re headed, how we work, our Backlog, processes, etc? The Snowstorm Team would love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Please feel free to respond to this post, Twitter using the hashtag #snowstorm or reply to @snowstormsl, email, or come to one of our weekly open source meetings.

Thanks!
Esbee Linden, Q Linden & Oz Linden