Exclusive: Why Reuters Left Second Life, And How Linden Lab Can Fix It
Reports of a marketing evac team swooping in a virtual huey to snatch Eric Reuters from the firm's Sadville bureau - while harried by squadrons of flying penises and pursued by crazed locals bent on acts of bestial sexual brutality - could not be confirmed.
I can add details: For a year and a half, I reported under the byline "Eric Reuters" in Second Life, before settling in at my new home here at SAI.
So what happened? Is Second Life dying? No, but the buzz is gone. For all the sound and fury over recent price hikes and layoffs at Linden Lab, Second Life has a community of fanatically loyal users. Since Linden Lab derives its revenue from user fees, not advertisements, Second Life is much more likely to survive the Web 2.0 shakeout than most other startups.
It's hard to say what, if anything, Linden Lab can do to make Second Life appeal to a general audience. The very things that most appeal to Second Life's hardcore enthusiasts are either boring or creepy for most people: Spending hundreds of hours of effort to make insignificant amounts of money selling virtual clothes, experimenting with changing your gender or species, getting into random conversations with strangers from around the world, or having pseudo-nonymous sex (and let's not kid ourselves, sex is a huge draw into Second Life). As part of walking my "beat," I'd get invited by sources to virtual nightclubs, where I'd right-click the dancefloor to send my avatar gyrating as I sat at home at my computer. It was about as fun as watching paint dry.
But here's how Linden Lab can make Second Life more fun and a better business:
- Build good newbie-oriented content. Linden has always taken the position they're in the 3D platform business, and can't be expected to build anything with their own tools or even know what others are doing in Second Life. That argument didn't fly when the gambling scandal broke and it doesn't work now. Second Life has a monster learning curve, and Linden Lab needs to hold new users' hands through every step of their first five or six hours. A big content push isn't even that expensive: the company has proven it can pay Second Lifers $10/hr to do these things and have skilled content creators begging for the job.
- Acknowledge that Second Life's reputation is now a liability. This isn't the worst thing in the world, but it does mean Second Life can't sit back and hope word-of-mouth brings in hordes of new users like it did back in 2006. Second Life needs to advertise, and the ads need to be hip. New CEO Mark Kingdon has an ad background and should have the right résumé to pull off a makeover.
- Radically simplify the user interface. The Second Life UI is a mess, and there's been no major changes to it in Second Life's 5+ years. Making the Second Life experience easy-to-use, even graceful, isn't a nice-to-have, it's a business imperative.
- Abandon the idea that Second Life is a business app. I wasn't in Second Life to play, I was there on assignment for Reuters. The login server would crash. I'd try to reach sources, but Second Life's IM window would hang on "waiting" all day when trying to figure out who was online. "Teleports" -- the ability to move from point to point anywhere in Second Life -- would stop working and I'd get locked out of my own office. These weren't one-offs, they were my daily, first-hand, happens-all-the-time experiences. For all its bugs, Second Life is tolerable as a playground, but enterprise users will never and should never use it for business. Re-focus on the core mission: Keeping the hobbyists happy and converting potential recruits into hardcore (read: fees-paying) users.
None of these things will make Second Life palatable to the general public, but it will draw new traffic and keep a lot more potential users with the right temperment for Second Life from quitting in frustration on their first day. That might be enough for the next year or two.
There's an incredible depth, passion, and camaraderie to the Second Life community that more popular online experiences like MySpace or World of Warcraft can't match. And while I didn't find it compelling, there really is something awesome about buying be able to "buy" a grid of blank 3D space, mold it like clay into an elven forest, a futuristic space station, or a bdsm dungeon, and then invite your friends to hang out.
See Also:
Real Estate Crashes In Second Life, Too: Linden Lab's Bailout Plan
Linden Lab Pulls Back Second Life Price Hikes, Confirms Layoffs
Second Life Offers Business Teleconferencing, Now Penis-Free
How Google Could Have Made Lively Work: No Sex, More Ads, Firefox
I agree that SL has a great opportunity to survive the current economic crisis and if anything that fuels my continued interest in the space. It could still be a business app, but not really on the live grid, private servers running SL will be the kicker there. They will of course have to tie into the main grid for some other features and applications as needed.
One piece you did not comment on was the vast use of SL by educators. That seems to be an equally engaged group that in general not the normal resident types.
We all know that the VW industry has fixated on the youth markets as a way of breeding the real generation of 3d users.
Any comments on the educator piece?
Education use of SL has been very big (a piece I wrote for Reuters about that). What's telling for me though is all these kids are essentially being assigned Second Life as homework -- but we don't see college kids doing lots of blogging about Second Life, or using their SL avatar as their primary online identity, and the 18-25 demos for SL are terrible.
Education, while huge, remains something of a sideshow to Linden's core mission. These kids are all boosting SL's "total hours", but they're not contributing significantly to SL's micro-economy, and they're not being converted into (fees-paying) landowners. Worse, once OpenSim happens (will be viable by next academic year), tight education budgets will compel many schools to abandon SL for similar tech that's free and open-source.
I think a lot of that is that the learning curve to really "get" Second Life beyond very specific use cases is still way too high, and the UI is an obstacle to be overcome, not a joy to use. And, well, SL only really appeals to a very specific type of person. The best thing for Linden's (and SL's) long-term health is to find more people who "fit," and convert them into landowners. Again: Advertising, orientation, and a new UI.
Eric,
It would be great if you avatar received "Social credits" or "Game credits" for efforts in SL class and from homework as you mentioned that could be used to increase their avatars level or standing in the community or be used in anther VW to advance the level of their avatar.
Man, I would totally do extra credit home work if I got some WOW gold or I could gain rep to get an Epic purple Wow item for my character. Sort of like how I used to get drive time credit with my parents when I did home work, but really needed to go from learning permit to full license.
Bottom line is that SL represents a game like setting that educators use to connect with students in a venue that they might enjoy participating in, not the be their primary game experience. It is just to compete a bit better with games.
However, I do want me homework and class participation credits transferable to me LOTRO or WOW character.
I agree completely. And keep an eye on OpenSim -- once it's finished it will turn everything Second Life on its head.
The recent posting my the new Product Manager, Tom Hale, is aimed at gaining feedback regarding what residents expect from a "premium account." Good news in a way, but it sets a tiny bell ringing at the back of my mind and makes me think that a price change is on the way. Or a set of price change. The recent Openspace kerfuffle is probably one of a series of pricing revamps to come over the next year or two. Many folks think LL is NOT aiming for an IPO but I'm not so sure. Revamp your management team; restructure pricing; rationalize resources - all steps toward an IPO prep.
We do, indeed, live in interesting times ;)
"Abandon the idea that Second Life is a business app. I wasn't in Second Life to play, I was there on assignment for Reuters. ... For all its bugs, Second Life is tolerable as a playground, but enterprise users will never and should never use it for business. Re-focus on the core mission: Keeping the hobbyists happy and converting potential recruits into hardcore (read: fees-paying) users."
and
"There's an incredible depth, passion, and camaraderie to the Second Life community that more popular online experiences like MySpace or World of Warcraft can't match. And while I didn't find it compelling, there really is something awesome about buying be able to "buy" a grid of blank 3D space, mold it like clay into an elven forest, a futuristic space station, or a bdsm dungeon, and then invite your friends to hang out."
Putting business prior to community in Second Life, as LL keeps trying to do, is putting the cart before the horse. That's not to say it's impossible for certain businesses to find a way to use Second Life (or OpenSim) but rather that the community is more important than the features.
This community is a new thing, and for LL to try to manage it, without embracing it, is leading to pain and poor communication. Second Life cannot be a mainstream app because of its hardware demands and because the steep learning curve is most easily negotiated by technical people and power users. The result of this winnowing is what makes the community - high IQ, highly technical, highly creative. I think that's a community worth marketing to. But spurning it in favor of a mainstream user that can't find a point in Second Life makes no sense.
Why do I say that? World of Warcraft and other traditional games *tell you what to do.* Precisely because Second Life does not, many mainstream users will abandon it in boredom. But the open sandbox is a joy for the do-it-yourself types that make the content for the Second Life communities.
Congratulations on your new gig, and on an excellent article. Your points are dead on. I've been in SL since December of 2002, and for all the ways it has grown and changed, the singular element that makes it so compelling is still there - the unlimited creative freedom that is also incredibly accessible to average people. Yet, so much continues to work against that - Linden Lab is their own worst enemy (and their customers' as well).
I think the customer base of Second Life, especially the hardcore creative and social communities are not as loyal as it would seem. There simply is no real viable option beyond Second Life at this point that offers the same experience at this moment. OpenSim is definitely something to watch, but right now it feels like being back in the early beta of SL and has its own share of frustrations. Granted, SL itself often feels like being in early beta still.
The upcoming year should prove an interesting test for the longevity of Second Life. With a horrible global economy and the exodus of remaining business clients from Second Life, it is more important than ever for Linden Lab to nuture the relationship it has with its dedicated customers. As usual, they don't seem to get that, as the Open Space price hike fiasco seems to indicate. Alternatives to Second Life are emerging quickly, and it won't be long before it is too late to keep those dedicated customers around.
The result has been hodgepodge marketing, a disinterest in any sort of hands-on resident management unless it threatens LL legally, and a long, painful process of stretching the grid architecture to finally - after 5 years - sorta-kinda run dependably enough to host 50-60,000 concurrent users.
I'm glad others are optimistic about the future of Second Life. Given what I've witnessed in my 3 1/2 years, I'm not so sanguine. Nobody's really sure what we have here because LL has never adequately defined it. If their intent was to start a social experiment and see where it goes, they've succeeded. But that's not a business model and eventually such experiments have a way of shrivelling up and fading while other more robust ventures take root and thrive.
If you have no direction, you can't get there. And at some point when you've lost so many potential new users after an hour or a week or a year of pointless crashes, IP thefts and inventory loss, it's too late to start getting a direction. That was your golden opportunity, LL, but it came and went. All that's left now is the drifting away.
With the attitude I've seen from Linden Lab in my time with Second Life, I do not see that happening very quickly.
The Lindens seem to have an aversion to the less glamorous, but no less necessary, needs of SL's users. Simple requests, such as being able to see the height of one's own avatar while editing it, or being able to hide parts of the avatar mesh without invisi-prims, have been ignored or dismissed outright by the Lindens.
It seems no request is even considered unless it is driven by a popular movement. Even then, more often than not, it will be left to wither on the vine.
Education is doing more than assigning homework. There are plenty of universities in there, as well as matters such as Diabetes UK having a presence to educate people. Distance learning concepts are trying to be applied to Second Life, although some of the basics are missing to really make that area grow.
There was an article in The Guardian recently highlighting the usage of Second Lfe for educational conferences, Second Life can deliver in these areas but the performance issues you highlight will be a huge factor on whether that is a growth area.
You need to separate the Second Life world from the Second Life Grid. Immersive workspaces etc. don't and won't be on the same server space as the Second Life world, horses for courses and all that.
Some people enjoy playing house, there will be other developments to engage other users. How Second Life technology competes with Opensim will be an interesting issue, Linden Lab need to make strides in that battle.
The biggest problems for Linden Lab are self inflicted by their poor management decisions, the recent price rises being one glaring example. Until they start to think systemically, which Tom Hale recently touched upon, they're doomed to repeat the mistakes of their past. Having a story about flying penises may discourage business users from entering, annoying your loyal fanbase by reckless decision making harms the bottom line far more.
Desmond also had a salient point on the official SL forums - people stay in SL because of friends. Find a way for them to make friends right away or lose them forever....
I don't see how an IPO is possibly while new registrations & buzz are slowing, not gaining.
skribe
It is theoretically possible to combine all of these stated interests but I would be pushed to say that I believed that any combination was actually _working_, and I certainly wouldn't say that there was any consistent Vision Thing.
In general, I tend to believe that LL as a company has done a terrific job in providing a space for people, and really needs to realise that the people who are using it know better than it does what they want to do and what can be done. This does not mean that it needs to become some sort of straight "hosting provider", but it does mean that they should avoid these radical policy jumps and business moves and concentrate on making things easier for _other people to make content for them and pay them for the privilege_, which they are quite happy to do.
I found this article but i was looking for another issue.
I couldnt find what i was looking for but thanks for everything..
Regards.
Gucci Belts
Regards.
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Reuters isn't the only one to leave Second Life. Numerous groups-- including the old and large Elf Clan-- are preparing for that eventuality. Linden Lab seems to be focused on making the Second Life platform unworkable-- both from a continued show-stopper-bug standpoint and from a financial standpoint. They've price-gouged their customers to the limits, and past.
Because of these things, it might be considered that after five years, Linden Lab has had their chance. They continue in the same self-serving direction, the same monopolistic profiteering mindset. Perhaps it's time for us to stop trying to help Linden Lab (it's obviously not working) and instead, we should start working with emerging new systems that are pointed toward what Second Life should have been.
While the Open Grid Project is still in its early stages, it is making significant and even startling progress. Six months ago I could hardly walk, couldn't create an avatar, couldn't build and store builds to my inventory. Now I can do all these things and more. That is amazing progress over just a six-month period of time.
So instead of continuing to put our efforts and recommendations behind a self-serving profit-oriented corporation... it might be time to start putting our focus, recommendations and assitance in the projects that are dedicated to returning power to the users.
Second Life: $295 per sim, 15,000 prims, no megaprims, no microprims 30m arbitrary link limit.
Open Grid: $75 to $100 per sim, 45,000 prims, megaprims, microprims, link limits removed.
Why then, should we continue to bash our heads against a wall trying to assist a company that has continued on a customer-unfriendly, suicidal course for five years. Far better use of time to support, assist and cooperate with those who are formed by users, for users, and to benefit users. Linden Lab's days are numbered-- and it's their own fault. It's hard to foresee the exact future of VR, but I'm fairly certain it's not going to be Linden Lab.
If not, the genie of a 3d user created space is out of the bottle. The show will go on.
I posted about this almost a year ago, suggesting that LL would get a lot more traffic if it told the truth and promoted Second Life as an escape from the real world:
http://bit.ly/5AXk
lig tv izle
forum
Linden Lab has lost that community-oriented vision that initially brought them success. They are trying to evolve the Second Life grid into a 3D version of Net Meeting which is completely laughable. We all know how impossible it is to hold a stable meeting in-world.
The Lab is also becoming increasingly desperate to find a killer app for their platform, even offering a $10,000 prize to anybody that can. http://lindenlab.com/lindenprize With big names leaving SL (Such as Reuters) their name-dropping list of Fortune-500 clients is dwindling.
What Marcus Kingdom fails to realize, is that PEOPLE are the killer app of the metaverse, not towering corporate ghost towns with 15 traffic.
Developers like Rivers Run Red are marketing the grid as a platform to move "Mission critical aspects of your business" into. I don't know about you, but I think I will move "mission critical" aspects of my business to a platform that does not crash 10 times a day.
Good piece, but not sure it is really news...
http://rezzable.com/blog/rightasrain-rimbaud/reuters-finally-leaves-second-life
I don't blame you for giving up on the buzz. I was in SL as long as you, and in that time, as someone of the demographic, have been banned several times and accused of being a griefer when I did nothing to deserve the title. Once you have been labeled as a "bad person" by a loud mouthpiece who screams enough to where the company employees even believe based on no evidence, you're hard pressed to find any reason to stay. Linden Labs' problem is mostly because of #4. They tried to make it business oriented, and attracted dull, bigoted, and an older demographic that doesn't want "kids" in their yard. It's already hard enough to attract the college demographic as most are too busy with social lives (myspace, facebook) and too busy studying, and usually lack the amount of time and money that's required to play second life.
In the time I did play, I saw the 18-25 demographic come and go for many of the reasons above. SL became dull, you couldnt express yourself in any way that deviated from SL's "norm" without the looming threat of being banned or being reported as underaged, a good way to remove the 18-20 demographic as one of the requirements to prove your age is a utility bill proving your home address. I don't know about you, but most college goers I know either have prepaid cell phones or phones paid for by family members, let alone any other "bills".
I personally think it's a good move that Reuters left SL, it'll send another shot across the bow that may wake Linden Labs up. But it may be too late. They need to start marketing it as a "build your own world" type service instead of "make money and buy things" type service again. That *may* save them.
Abso-f'n-lutley Right!
The problem lies within the fact that the Brits and the San Franciscans are a bunch of easy influenced, emotionally deficient shut-ins themselves - and to make matters worse - they tag team the responsibilities like shit. I don't intend to be mean here, just telling you what I've learned from 1st hand interaction over a 2 year period with the likes of Harry, Robin, Chadrick and most recently - DavidT OnTyne. They fail at providing "world class" service for something many actually pay for. It's way too easy for any avatar to get "pegged" a griefer and subsequently denied service on the basis of pure subjectivity. In the mean time, these cats let a multitude of real griefers go around perpetrating DoS (Denial of Service) attacks on anyone they choose without penalty. Oh wait, I guess if you pay the piper on land holdings you allowed to do that - LOL.
And then you get this BS line -
"Linden Lab has the right at any time for any reason or no reason to suspend or terminate your Account, terminate this Agreement, and/or refuse any and all current or future use of the Service without notice or liability to you." Basically summed up as - "We need no reason at all - didn't you know - it's all phase of the moon with us Linden types".
They also have the right to demand governmental ID's, to subject users to an endless list of security and age verification steps and to take the cowardly way out, with a total lack of explanation when it comes to Governance decisions.
Philip use to draw comparisons to eBay back at the height of hype (circa Nov '06). Trust me, most of us KNOW eBay - and Linden Research is NO eBay!
You are exactly right Eric, that they havent done a significant upgrade to the client in 5 years, other than purely aesthetic things like WindLight, which only put more burden on peoples machines. If they had, instead, put effort into making the group system something that anybody could organize a corporation, a non-profit, or an educational facility through, that would make every demographic find SL far more useful and appealing.
Another problem is the LL billing system is punitive and byzantine and buggy. Your own company ran into this problem when LL repeatedly billed arbitrary employees of Reuters $500 US to renew RegAPI access rather than Reuters directly, something that no employee could put on an expense report cause it was not preapproved by management. How could LL promote SL as a business platform if they refused to develop features in their billing system that lets them bill corporations by normal real world business billing methods, rather than just charging individual employees credit cards? Obvious incompetence.
robin@lindenlab.com
marty@lindenlab.com
cyn@lindenlab.com
(415) 243-9000
not saying that there is no sex, but with some university research showing that 17% percent of peeps do go to sl for sex, I don't know if that is bigger than other activities. like what's the percentage of people using eharmony, or people going to bars in real life, or just the way people look and judge others. i bet those numbers are huge too (Freud would say almost 100% of anything is driven by sex)
but since you are a news reporter you placed those numbers here right? no? oh, this is more of an opinion piece . . .
well i hope that my opinion holds as much value as yours, guess since i am either a shut in, or old in the had or something . . .
sl is like many things in the world, it is what you make of it. i am sorry to see Reuter's pull out of it and for me, I love it
LL malfunction pontifications by other responders? that's rich, start your own metaverse if ya know so much, or don;t waste any more time with sl, pretty easy. if it's that craptacular, don't pay any attention to it
metaverses are here to stay, not saying that LL will be the one, lots of good ideas go dowbn the tubes. but it's like that stupid Google thing many years back - how the hell will anyone make money with that stupidness? good thing most of us are so intelligent and good at telling others how they should be doing it, man, I am so smart that i am gonna give advice on how to improve it cuz it's way easier than actually doing something (btw, if you want to do good with the lottery, only buy winning tickets!)
just my opinion, not as a news person, just a person seeing sl for what it is: a communication tool just like a blog or that internet thing, make of it what you like, flying penises and all =)
People are hungry for enhanced personal/social interaction, in an increasingly impersonal world. Second Life is an ideal environment for recreating an infinite variety of social environments, that appeal to everyone from Trekkies to Vampires to Educators and Archeological Explorers. The key is to build and promote relevant content that appeals to these groups and collaborate with the 1st Life organizations that already manage large numbers of social "verticals."
Second Life's technical challenges are daunting, but not insurmountable. They have a tremendous lead on developing and supporting an infrastructure to support a large-scale Virtual Metaverse. As others have pointed out, LL needs to radically streamline the browser and make it significantly faster. If LL makes the client usable for as few as 20% more potential users and reduces system overhead by the same amount, it would make a huge positive impact on their bottom line.
Marketing doesn't seem to be LL's strong suit. Perhaps they have been reluctant to market more, because they are afraid of breaking the system with too many users. Whatever the reason, a solid marketing campaign, designed to build more premium individual and business subscriptions, would help invigorate the SL economy and reduce unprofitable overhead, caused by non-paying users, consuming only freebie merchandise and "playing" without benefit of true buy-in.
LL also needs to develop a channel marketing and sales strategy that includes a strong affiliate program and channel partner program. The affiliate program should be designed to make it easy for people to refer friends and associates, with a wide variety of referral links/widgets (think Amazon) that can be used with FaceBook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. There should also be a channel partner program that provides tools, training and revenue opportunities for partners who sell and support SL-based solutions!
Let's not forget Strategic Marketing, Co-branding and Integration opportunities! There are literally thousands of professional, fraternal and business organizations with millions of members world-wide. I don't think I've EVER heard of a SL sales person making a direct sales call on one of these organizations and offering them a compelling sales pitch on why SL was a solution they needed. Perhaps when the new dedicated server/private grid product is released...
Integration is another hot issue. Bottom line, I want a plug-in for Microsoft Outlook that allows me to synchronize my "friends" on SL with their 1st Life identities. While we're at it, how about a LinkedIn API connection. And to top it off, I want to be able to have an Alt (or two) that shares all of my primary accounts contacts, inventory, etc, with the ability to group my contacts by category and choose which of my identities I want to share with them.
The last and possibly greatest challenge is customer service. Especially in "tough times," service is the only thing you have to sell. Everything else is a commodity. LL needs to find better (less geeky) ways of getting their customers feedback and making them feel like they are partners in their world's development and growth.
I look forward to "living" and working in SL for years to come. I hope LL takes these and similar suggestions to heart and continues to build a Metaverse we can all be proud of and that continues to offer opportunities for both social and business entrepreneurs!