Jo Yardley indirectly pointed me towards another article on Second Life and its past / future and what is going on at the Lab. Written by Susan Karlin, the piece again covers some familiar territory, but also offers-up a light analysis of the platform as well as taking a look at the road ahead.
The first thing to be noted about the piece is that Karlin gets the creative opportunities offered by SL and its the ability to bridge the digital / real-life divide in many unique ways for those who wish to do so.
A slide show at the top of the piece gives a more than fair representation of the platform’s breadth of appeal / promise ability and also its ability to reach through into real life and have real and lasting impact for people – be it the real life relationship which blossomed between Anglo-American couple Damien Fate and Washu Zebrastripe (both now well-known in content creation circles) which led to their eventual marriage and the birth of their son, or the story of Holocaust survivor Fanny Starr, or the work of Beth Noveck, a law professor who served as President Obama’s deputy chief technology officer for open government until 2011 and who used Second Life as an educational platform through her avatar Lawlita Fassbinder.
Within the article, Karlin highlights some of the weaknesses of the platform without feeling the need to dismiss SL in the process. While she rides the wave of LL’s infographic, which highlights the one-million log-ins per month and the 400,000 new sign-ups, she also points out the former has remained on a plateau (“stable”) despite the 400,000 apparently arriving on SL’s doorstep each month, only for around some 80% to turn around and walk away again.
Her quotes from Rod Humble also help provide more of a framework as to why he’s been pushing the Lab in the direction he has over the last two years.
The Lab is constantly chastised not “dealing with lag” or not “improving performance”. But the reality is, that issues of performance have been a core focus for Humble since the day he arrived at the Lab – and has been so, purely as a result of the feedback from the many who try SL only to leave, a good portion of whom cited “performance” as being a major issue in their exit feedback. In this, Karlin’s piece is timely, as many of the various threads of this ongoing work – interest list updates, HTTP work, SSB/A, and so forth – are just coming out into the open, with the promise of more work to come.
Karlin’s article makes it clear this strategy runs deep. I recently pointed to a comment made by Humble to Benny Evangelista of the San Franscisco Chronicle in which Humble talks in terms of winning back the 30+ million people who tried SL and gave up. In that piece, the comment was couched in the framework of the Lab’s plans for their future endeavours. However, Karlin’s article makes it pretty clear that those 30+ million have been on his mind for a good while now and have been one of the influences which has shaped LL’s strategy and approach to SL.
She also touches on the fact that LL are still committed to the platform despite their move to try to diversify their products portfolio, noting:
The goal is to strengthen Second Life’s core infrastructure, while expanding Linden’s offerings in other types of shared communities … What has always worked–and what Linden seeks to tap into with its other products–is a virtual community that can have as much resonance as in real life … Hoping to tap that enthusiasm, Humble is developing a Linden Lab product line of cloud-sharing interactive community building apps unrelated to Second Life.
Diversifying is, as I’ve said in the past, generally considered a positive move for any company occupying a single-product market space. Yet even before any product had been announced, many in SL immediately denounced the Lab’s planned move to diversify as indicative the company had “given up” on SL or were merely using it as a “cash cow” to serve their new products. Not even strong evidence to the contrary, with the Lab continuing to refine and enhance the platform or the fact it has continued to invest heavily in infrastructure improvements aimed solely at the platform or that it has recruited / acquired talent outside of the pool of resources working on SL with which to develop their new products, would sway naysayers from this view.
Of course, there is a broader discussion on how actually effective LL’s new products are in terms of promotion and market penetration, but that falls outside of a piece such as Karlin’s.
Some might dismiss this as a “light ” piece, albeit one which attempts to take a step back from the line of the Lab’s message and apply a little more thinking to its coverage of SL True, it doesn’t plumb the depths some of us, as SL users would perhaps like to see, such as issues around revenue and tier. But then, mainstream media probably isn’t any more interested in plumbing those depths than LL is in seeing them explored, so to dismiss the piece purely on these grounds might be a tad unfair.
What is particularly refreshing about Karlin’s article is that it is one in which the writer actually groks the broad creative opportunities it provides and who understands the sheer power of the platform to connect lives. That alone makes it a refreshing read when compared to the tired retreads of “where SL went wrong” and “whatever happened to” pieces all too often rolled out by those is the media unwilling to give the platform a second look.
It’s also good to see someone in the media picking-up on The Drax Files, which makes no fewer than two appearances in the article.
Related Links
- A Look At Second Life’s Second Decade – Fastcompany, July 5th
- Will Second Life have a second life? – San Francisco Chronicle, June 23rd
- Whatever happened to Second Life? – “Doing rather nicely, TYVM” – this blog, June 23rd
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
It’s certainly a better article than most I have seen, but talking about grokking Second Life is maybe mistaken. We;ve become so used to the superficial commentary in the media (and it’s a general weakness of the media, it’s not just about SL), that a report which shows signs of somebody actually looking at the topic will stand out from the crowd.
You don’t have to grok something to spot an obvious difference.
I know, that can easily seem like damning with faint praise. But lets not get carried away over a display of ordinary competent jousnalism.
LikeLike
Sure, it’s easy to over-state something, but I don’t think the headline or comment is wide of the mark.
Karlin has taken the time to research SL & has demonstrated she does understand the inherent power of the platform – so, in essence, she does “grok” it, far moreso than the likes of the BBC (and others) have tended to to demonstrate over the years.
And in this day and age, as you point out, competent journalism would seem to be in short supply, so why not underline the fact someone has for once put a finger on the pulse of the appeal of SL?
LikeLike
What is grokking for the uninitiated?
LikeLike
Well, stictly speaking it’s most commonly used to indicate shared thinking / reasoning (although there are other uses for the”grok”. In this instance, I’m using it in the broader sense of “getting” / understanding.
LikeLike