SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

Greetings everyone!

Over the last several months we’ve been hard at work making Second Life more relevant, more usable and more reliable.  Our work is showing up in Second Life’s usage statistics.  On Sunday of this past weekend, we hit another concurrency high of 76,946 and yesterday log-ins for the previous 60 days crossed the 1.4 Million mark.

What have we been up to?

Reliability is a top strategic focus for the Lab.  In October, FJ Linden described how we are launching LL Net (our private fiber optic ring connecting our data centers) to provide additional redundancy and eliminate our reliance on VPNs.  I am happy to report that this project is ahead of schedule and other improvements are underway.

Another top priority is to make Second Life more relevant. Last month, Ben Glenn discussed the work we are doing with Big Spaceship to improve the first hour experience.  This project is moving along at a nice clip, as well.  You will soon see a new website design that visually highlights the wonderful range of activities people enjoy in Second Life.

With T Linden (Tom Hale) on board and working closely with the user experience team, we are also making great progress on the usability project.  It’s a major effort because the viewer is at least three applications in one.  Maybe four.  Redesigning it so that it is easy to use for new Residents without sacrificing functionality for experienced users is no simple task and it’ll take well into second half of next year before you will be downloading a new and different client.  (In the interim, we’ll have regular viewer updates, as we do now.)  We’ve landed on a new look and feel for the viewer that I am very excited about.  Now we begin the hard work of redesigning the menu structures and tool layouts and modularizing the code base so that it can accommodate the design changes we are making.

As I mentioned in my last update, we’ve been actively hiring to support all the work underway to make Second Life more relevant, more usable and more reliable. I have some great news to share on the talent front.   We’ve added a new leader to our engineering leadership team.

Howard Look (you’ll know him as Howard Linden) is joining us as SVP of Customer Applications — which we call “The Front.” He’ll be responsible for leading the engineering team responsible for the customer-facing part of the Second Life experience.  Throughout 2009, Howard will be working with T Linden and our product, design teams and engineering teams to reshape the Second Life viewer into a simple and intuitive interface.

Before joining Linden Lab, Howard was VP of Software at Pixar.  His team created and maintained Pixar’s proprietary film-making system. Prior to Pixar, Howard was on the founding team of TiVo where he headed up Application Software and User Experience.  TiVo could have had a highly complex interface that put distance between users and the content they were seeking.  Instead, the company did the opposite.  By making the device intuitive and easy to use — and therefore attractive to a broad market — TiVo changed the way people watch TV.  Prior to TiVo, Howard was at SGI where he worked on the Inventor team.   While Director of Applied Engineering, Howard and his team created a virtual world called “O2 Out of the Box Experience.”

Howard also has a passion for education and spent time this past summer as a substitute teacher (4th grade and middle school math).  He told me they were his hardest days of work ever.

When I met Howard, it was clear he was a great fit for Linden Lab – rich content creation tools (Pixar), intuitive interfaces (TiVo), 3D worlds (SGI) and a bonus attribute in his passion for education. I’m very pleased that Howard decided to join the executive team at Linden Lab.

We’re assembling a world-class team to deliver on our promise of a highly relevant and delightful user experience and a stable and reliable platform.

Cheers!
– M Linden

Hello, I’m Frank Ambrose, the Senior VP of Global Technology, and I’d like to take this opportunity to let you know about some of the work we’re doing on the Second Life Grid.

By way of introduction, I’m a recent hire here at the Lab, having joined to lead our global technology team. Specifically I’ll be focused on grid infrastructure and our stability initiatives. As noted in the press release, I come to the Lab from many years at AOL (and prior to that MCI), where I experienced the kind of explosive growth, global scale and inherent stability challenges we face here at Linden Lab.

More than anything else, my tenures at those companies taught me the direct relationship between platform stability and user experience. I’m looking forward to applying that lesson, and a host of others, as we work to maintain, build and improve this complex virtual world. I am keenly aware of the pain that any service outage can cause and am both excited and confident that Linden Lab has focused the right resources to achieve this critical objective.

Given the complexities in our architecture, our stability efforts span many individual areas, most of which were detailed by Ian Linden’s May posting. Some areas will be addressed through short-term initiatives, while others will require significant re-architecture, software changes and new physical hardware. Throughout it all, we’re committed to making the transition to a more stable world as seamless and transparent to you as possible. To that end, members of my team will be using the blog regularly to provide updates on plans and progress towards meeting our stability goals.

As part of our wider stability plan, we’re targeting 4 major infrastructure points both with long-and short-term goals: Intra-Grid Network, Asset Storage Cluster, Central Databases, and Host/Transit Data Services. The strategy is to develop and deploy near-term solutions to improve stability, while looking more broadly at our architecture (hardware, software, networks, etc). In the near term we’ve got a number of projects in flight to address some of these problem points. A couple of examples are:

- Asset collection. We’re collecting many assets that are on our storage clusters, but are rarely (if ever) accessed. These assets take up critical space on the clusters and potentially degrade performance and stability as we hit volume thresholds. We’ll be moving these files to different storage mechanisms and, while they will still be easily accessible, it will help us to avoid pushing the limits of our existing storage clusters, while still preserving all existing assets in a reliable storage environment.

- Reducing the need for VPN connections.  Since we don’t encrypt communication between simulators and our databases, there needs to be a safe means to communicate across data centers and so we use VPN connections. The connections don’t scale well and can be unreliable (insert wiki to the Linden Network), so establishing a new communications mechanism, that is both safe, scalable and reliable, is another short-term project.

These projects are just a sampling of the work that is currently being done to improve stability, and I’ll be reporting on their progress, as well as other short-term projects, in the coming months.

We have a lot of work to do but be assured that we have the right resources and internal focus to achieve our stability goals. From personal experience, I’ve encountered many equally complex challenges, especially in my time at AOL, and these problems are all solvable with the right level of attention and technical talent. We certainly have both, now we will start delivering.

So, you know a lot about Second Life, right? You’ve got ideas, big ideas, and are tired of waiting around for Linden Lab to make it just so. The challenge of stabilizing, maintaining, and extending the Second Life Grid, and the dozens of services and thousands of machines it entails, excites you. If this describes you, you should check out our job listings!

Three of the prioritized positions are web developers, production operations engineers, and production operations developers, but many other openings are currently available.

Web Developers
Web development is where the Second Life Grid meets the world outside of the viewer. The Lindex, Land Store, registration and account management processes are all examples of services created and maintained by our web developers. We are looking to add top quality talent to any of our offices, but particularly Mountain View, Seattle, and Brighton.

Production Operations
Our Production Operations team is a high performing group of *nix achievers, consisting of 100% remote employees and 0% pager duty.  The team is responsible for the health of the Second Life Grid, and provides monitoring, diagnostic, escalation, and resolution support. We are currently focusing our search in Australia and Singapore, but are also considering candidates from the United States and the United Kingdom willing to work Asia-Pacific hours.

Go to http://lindenlab.com/employment to see all our job listings.

Linden Lab Production Operations has open positions for Production Operations developers and systems engineers in Australia, Singapore, the United States, and United Kingdom. The Production Operations team is responsible for ensuring that the Second Life grid, the world’s largest collaborative real-time development environment, is up and running.

Linden Lab Operations is a Debian Linux shop. We rely extensively on OSS, and our in-house systems are usually written in Python or PHP. Our team is made up of folks who have been involved in large-scale grid management and site operations for years.

We’re looking for people who can rapidly pinpoint and diagnose network failures, deployment issues, and performance bottlenecks, who can also create tools which will improve grid stability. Production Operations works extensively with the Concierge, System Engineering, Governance, I-world, and Development teams to triage and respond to grid problems; therefore, the ability to communicate effectively with techies and non-techies is critical. The successful candidate will have substantial *nix experience and script-fu, familiarity in managing large system installations, and no fear of complex, dynamic systems.

If this sounds like you, please click here and submit your resume for one of the “Production Operation” postings (Developer or Systems Engineer).