theories about why online gaming or other online activities have more recession-proof characteristics, because it drives more entertainment value, high-usage value for your dollar. And if you compare the cost of 10 or 20 dollars spent in a month, and compare that to the number of movies, you only get four hours watching two movies. As you know, you can be in Second Life for hours and hours without paying anything.
So it's been a very strong month. But I wouldn't, with one month of data in the current financial crisis, I wouldn't go so far to say 'oh yeah, it's a recession-proof business.'
Industry Standard: Now you mentioned 20% before. Of the population, or the hours?
Yoon: The revenue base. And I think there's some correlation in that with the active user base and to the hours of usage. Honestly, that wasn't the number that was important to me in my mind about launching an initiative around this business. Again, you launch a business based on the revenue characteristics.
Industry Standard: When you say launch the business, you mean ...
Yoon: Internal launch. We always had some experimentation with different infrastructure deployments. Certainly, different customer segments, so I would say that one that we've looked at for significantly longer than just the last few months, but I would say in the last few months (muddled).
Industry Standard: The Second Life Grid. When did this really start to get off the ground?
Yoon: Second Life Grid just in terms of the name and the branding, the best way to look at that is the domain registration date for secondlifegrid.net. I think that was probably more than a year ago. You can take a look at that fairly easily. And at that time, I can remember us thinking "hey we do want to have some technology infrastructure branding so that people understand that it's not merely the community experience, it's all of what we've created, but really the technology underpinning." We had that thought about the branding and we registered the website in the space of a week or something like that.
That's probably the most accurate historical guideline you'll find today of when we started thinking about that.
Industry Standard: How many staff at Linden are devoted to this (the grid)?
Yoon: Although we are a significantly larger company, we're not one that's really large enough to really segment out into divisions or into a separate business unit. Obviously there's a significant part, the great mass of the technology underpinnings are the same system in many ways, certainly the same software code base. So I couldn't put an exact number on it because there's a lot of overlap. In terms of dedicated staff, and this is exclusive of all the common technology space, it’s like a small startup within a startup. It's not maybe great news for other people trying to do the same thing, but we essentially have as many bodies as some who are doing similar things (muddled).
Industry Standard: Can you give me the one line or two line description of what the Second Life grid is?
Yoon: The Second Life grid is the technology tools and services platform that allows the simulation of Second Life and other immersive and virtual experiences.
Industry Standard: Who are your customers?
Yoon: At the Second Life Grid? I think that it is targeted at primarily anyone who is not interested in the experience of the Second Life community.
You know, obviously there's a lot of heightened rhetoric around business users coming over and taking over the world. In my mind it's very similar to the kind of rhetoric you see any time an early adopter technology goes from a very small and tight community to a larger set of use cases, and that's sort of 'big, bad businesses come in.' From the early adopter
Comments
Such a long article and no mention of gray textures or objects that appear only after you've flown past them. Six years or more of Second Life and still the claim that used to be on the secondlife.com site "the world appears before you turn to it", has not been fulfilled.
When internet speeds increase to a certain point, won't that eliminate the advantage offered by the use of Second Life prims, enabling the use of meshes instead? Meshes which can be made in programs outside of the Second Life viewer, thus eliminating the need for Second Life builders, i.e., prim builders?
@Chuck - Speeds won't eliminate the advantage because a) less streaming content is always better ... especially in areas where providers start throttling service, and b) prims could be much more complex than what is currently offered. Prims are more like CAD data (e.g. Pro/E); meshes are what you get from a non-CAD 3D modeler (e.g. 3DSMax). As someone who uses both professionally, I'd personally be pleased if they improved the prim tools (e.g. allow builders to draw profiles for extrusions). However, as someone who knows that the platform could benefit from greater support from the broader 3D community, I'm supportive of an importer.
That said, Linden Lab has already broached the subject of both upgrading the prim modeling tools and allowing the import of mesh files. The issue wasn't which to do, but which should take priority. I believe mesh import won.
Why would business people want to use Second Life as a collaborative tool, when there are so many easy to use conferencing and collaborative tools that are specifically designed for the task at hand?
The Second Life system itself is too unreliable for business meetings. Just ask any player (er.. resident) about server and database downtime or client (on your PC) crashes.
The avatar is an extra layer of complexity that business people don't need. The learning curve is steep, and not everyone masters 3D navigation quickly, if at all.
A meeting of avatars is like going to a business meeting where each person has to operate a puppet, and can only communicate with the others through that puppet's actions.
If this works, I'm going to open a puppet supply house targeted at the Fortune 500.
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