SecondLife - How To Make Money In Second Life

I recently celebrated my fourth month at the Lab and it has been a terrific adventure so far. As the leader of this amazing company, what have I been focused on? Leading the company’s efforts to make Second Life more relevant, more usable and more reliable.

How are we doing?

We wrapped up a very busy and productive Summer here in the Northern Hemisphere with great results to report. First off, each week since August 31st has brought a concurrency high. Yesterday, the peak hit 71,232 – that’s an increase of 6% in less than a month. Year-over-year, peak concurrency has grown more than 38%. An even more impressive figure is the number of Residents who logged-in during the prior seven days. For the week ending September 19th, we had 505,839 unique log-ins – another Second Life record. Plus daily user-to-user transactions in Linden Dollars continue their steady climb.

What can we attribute this to? We simplified the registration process to make it easier for Residents to join, registrations are continuing at a healthy clip, existing Residents are spending more time inworld, viewer crash rates have declined, teleport failures have declined and database/network/simulator outages are down substantially (for the past three months, simulator outages were 24% of what they were the prior three months).

All are indications that Second Life is becoming more relevant, more usable and more reliable.

What’s next?

First Hour Experience: Shortly after I started, we kicked off a project to reinvent what we call the “first hour experience” (our web experience, the viewer, and the way we acclimate and acculturate users inworld) for new users. We’ve made great progress and will be working with an award-winning interactive design firm to help us complete the reinvention and bring it to life. Yes, we are creating a viewer that is new user friendly! Stay tuned for updates.

Mainland Improvement: Jack Linden has written several blog posts about what we are doing to make the mainland a better experience for Residents so I won’t go into much detail other than to say that we recently banned ad farming which was a blight on the landscape. Our Department of Public Works (DPW) is continuing to make the mainland more attractive by adding roads, parks, buildings and gardens and other great features. The mainland is a crucial part of the Second Life experience and we are taking a more active role than we have historically in ensuring the inworld experience is a great one.

Experience Localization: When I joined in May, I attended new hire orientation at Linden Lab. One of my classmates was the new Linden hired to lead the localization of our product (websites, viewer, support tools). She has made great progress. By the end of the year, the viewer will be fully localized for all our major markets.

Product Focus: Linden Lab, like many startups was born out of a fascination with complex technology. This focus brought innovation and allowed for the breakthrough thinking behind Second Life. We are now at a stage in our development where we need to add addition product strategy, product development and product management experience to help us better tailor our product offering for each of our key markets. We’ve found just the right person to lead this important transition in the company. His name is Tom Hale (he will be called T Linden) and he is a technology industry veteran, having spent the last 14 years at Macromedia and Adobe where he held a variety of product strategy, development and management roles. Tom joins Linden Lab as Senior Vice President, Chief of Product. Read more about T Linden here.

Linden Lab is buzzing with activity. We’ve just completed a major strategy project to define the areas of focus for the next 18 months and we are in the process of translating those strategies into tactical action plans. To support the strategic initiatives we’ve identified, we’ll be hiring 60-70 more people over the next several quarters. This is all part of our commitment ensure Second Life remains the largest and most successful virtual world.

Thank you for your attention. I will meet you in the forums later this afternoon (sorry, I have meetings all day!) if you have pressing questions or concerns.

Cheers,

M Linden

For years, Philip Linden has talked about the annual Burning Man Festival and the ways its open-ended nature, participant-created content and art contributed to his vision of what Second Life could be.

For those who aren’t familiar with the event, Burning Man is an annual week-long art, fire and community celebration in the Black Rock Desert – a 400 square mile expanse of barren landscape in Northern Nevada – focused on community values like immediacy and participation. Attendees are invited to be whoever they are, express themselves however they want without fear of judgment or social criticism. It’s a place controlled only by the limits of the imagination – a place where 50,000 individuals come together to form a peaceful, respectful community where all ideas have merit and everyone is invited to create, share, explore, learn and grow.

Sound vaguely familiar? It should. Many of the same principles that guide Burning Man form the core foundations of the Second Life community.

With the histories of Second Life and Burning Man so closely intertwined, it should come as no surprise that a virtual rendition of the event exists – and will be celebrating its 6th anniversary starting today. Burning Life, as it’s called inworld, has now grown into one of the larger, annual Second Life events. This year’s Burning Life – which runs until October 5 – will feature art and live performances, interactive theme camps, a fashion show and of course, the burning of the Man amid a fireworks display.

To help commemorate Burning Life’s anniversary, Burning Man founder Larry Harvey and Philip will be participating in a panel discussion on Tuesday, Sept. 30. They’ll be chatting about their experiences, inspirations, reflection, future goals and the roles that both Burning Man and Second Life play in enhancing the human condition.

For more information on the discussion or on the event in general, including schedules and to find out how you can contribute and participate visit the official Burning Life Web site.

When: Burning Life opens Saturday at 9 a.m. pacific time and runs to October 5th.

Center Camp stage kicks off at 11 a.m. pacific. See the performance schedule here.

Where: Burning Life

What: Art installations, live events, music, discussions and more.

We’re pleased to announce the winners of the second annual Linden Lab Innovation Awards, known as “the Hippos,” which honor the exceptional, and varied, work done by open source community members.

Rob Linden presented the awards at a mixed reality event that linked an inworld gathering of nominees, attendees of the Second Life Community Convention in Tampa, FL, and others tuning in via audio stream. See the wiki for the full text of his presentation and a review of the last year’s highlights.

Winners were selected by a panel of six Linden judges who studied each nominees contributions and rated them for both for impact and positive influence. The judges all came away awed at the breadth of cxontribution and felt they were just scratching the surface. Today’s list of winners includes only a small portion of what is fantastic about this community. While we’re not sure we’ve recognized everyone we could, we’re very confident that we should give special recognition to these individuals.

And now, the winners…

Best Documentation
In this category, we wanted to find someone who contributed lots of great documentation and helped build a community of fellow writers in a helpful and friendly way. This is an area where a lot of people do a lot of great work — people like Gellen Glenelg, Strife Onizuka, SignpostMarv Martin and Catherine Pffefer — and, in fact, we had to declare a tie.

One of the winners tirelessly translated hundreds of pages into Japanese on the wiki, expanding the universe of Second Life residents, builders, and contributors in the process. The other was equally impressive with French translations. The work that these two residents have done has greatly expanded the reach of the ecosystem. The 2008 Hippo Award winners for Best Documentation are Asuka Neely and Gally Young.

Best Organizer
We split Best Organizer into two categories.

A. Best Issue Tracker Organizer
Organizing our issue tracker, aka “PJIRA” is a category in its own right. We had several really worthy contributors in this area: Ellla McMahon, Lex Neva and WarKirby Magojiro. However, we found that our winner could not be beat in raw, productive, obsessive compulsive organizing. The 2008 Hippo Award winner for Best Issue Tracker Organization is Harleen Gretzky.

B. Best Working Group Organization
Working group organization is also a very important asset to the community, and we have an embarrassment of riches here, too, including Zha Ewry and Saijanai Kuhn. Our winner in the category has been not only a good organizer, but a blog author and an implementor. After the first meeting of the Architecture Working Group, despite not being there in person like many people, he wrote what was probably the best summary of the meeting and what was discussed, which educated a lot of people about what AWG is about. He also has been instrumental in the creation of the PyOGP reference implementation for the open grid protocol. The 2008 Hippo Award winner for Best Working Group Organization is Tao Takashi.

Best Code Contribution
For this category, we were looking for the best feature or other code contribution. At first, we looked more closely at utility, but we also looked at how it was contributed. Runners-up included McCabe Maxstead’s “classic” viewer skin and Seg Baphomet’s OpenAL contribution. Choosing a winner was tough, but in the end we recognized that contributor who’s work was not only of great utility to the passionate and significant machinima community in Second Life, but who also did the work in a tidy and thoughtful way. The 2008 Hippo Award for Best Code Contribution goes to the contributor of the voice lipsync feature, Mm Alder.

The Jesse Malthus Award for Best Community Influence
This award is named in memorial to Jesse Malthus, an early contributor to the Second Life open source initiative who was always a cheerful and positive influence in-world and helped make things interesting and fun.

This year, the winner is a formidable presence on PJIRA. This resident often comments on very contentious issues in a constructive and thoughtful way. PJIRA would be a lot less organized and friendly place to be without the winner in this category, so it’s with great pleasure that I announce this year’s winner of the20008 Hipppo’s Jesse Malthus Award for Best Community Influence: Lex Neva.

Contributor of the Year
We had so many good choices to pick from here, including Whoops Babii’s 64-bit platform work, Carjay McGinnis viewer patches, Alissa Sabre’s translation work, and Gigs Taggart’s patches and PJIRA work. Our winner this year has contributed her fair share of patches, working with us to make sure that our transition to CMake is a smooth one. Many patches have helped get the Linux version of the viewer much closer to parity with the other platform versions. All of this is done with a cheerful and constructive attitude that attracts others to the project. It’s with great pleasure that I announce the 2008 Hippo Award Contributor of the Year is Michelle2 Zenovka.

Please join Linden Lab in thanking these contributors and the open source community for their work to improve the Second Life experience for everyone.