Philip Rosedale is a virtual world technologist and entrepreneur who launched Second Life in 2002. He currently serves as chairman of parent company Linden Lab and also leads several Second Life development projects. The Industry Standard interviewed Rosedale earlier this month in San Francisco, and talked with him about the state of the industry, Second Life's growth curve, and the potential of for 3D cameras and other cutting-edge technologies to change the way people interact online (see our interview with Linden Lab CEO Mark Kingdon here).
The Industry Standard: Second Life has been around since 2002 or 2003.
Philip Rosedale: Yes. I think 2002 was when we put it first out.
Industry Standard: Now, take the first 1000 users. If you are looking at the community then, and comparing it to now, what are some generalizations that you can say about how it has evolved or how it has changed?
Rosedale: One thing is that the first 1000 users were probably more like each other than any 1000 of the current million or so more active users are like themselves. Do you know what I mean? There is a lot more diversity in use, demographics and behavior in Second Life today than there was, say, at the end of 2003, which is when I think we were at about 1000 who were using it.
If you looked at the end of 2003, you saw the set pioneers, people who were inevitably more technical and more pioneering. They had more time on their hands to invest in the world of Second Life. I think there were probably just a few... If you got them all together in a room -- and I've seen this happen at our user conferences and the community conferences that people held -- they over time look less and less like each other.
The use cases -- you've been involved in reviewing them. By the way, it's so great to see somebody seriously evaluating a product that was itself built on top of Second Life. It is such a delight to me. I like that. That does look good. I mean, that was the first time, at least in my memory that that really happened.
Industry Standard: You're talking about Immersive Workspaces?
Rosedale: Yes. I think that, if you look at the diversity of use cases today, it is a lot broader. In the beginning, and I think there is a path that all new technological mediums follow. I think, the path is always the same in terms of who the users are in the beginning, middle and end. In the beginning, you always have novelty, art, socialization and early entrepreneurship driving the use of the medium. I think that was true for the Web. I think it was true for email. I think it was true for instant messaging. I think it's true for text messaging. As people begin to use that a lot more.
Industry Standard: For text messaging, art?
Rosedale: Yes, I think that people goof off. I guess what I'm saying is you don't use text messaging yet as a sort of reliable form of business communication. "Ian, are you here on time yet?" You know what I mean? It's still when you get a text message it's that weird feeling. You feel like it's kind of social, or sexy, or it's offbeat somehow. Artistic, novel, you know?
It's fun to send people text messages in meetings or just at times when you think they wouldn't be expecting it. And I think that's art. You're basically just playing with, you're making novel use of the new medium.
And I think Second Life in the very beginning was a lot like that. Everybody was like, "Huh. Well, can I make myself into a skeleton?" You know? Well, let's see, can you put the pieces together to do that? Or, "can I just wander around and talk to people?" Socialization. I mean, wow, there's just these other people.
And I think that new mediums always go through that, the first stage being that. Then the second stage, I think as people start to understand or trust the medium a little bit more, and I think this is somewhere around kind of where we are today with Second Life is you get like students and educators because they don't have CIOs to convince. They don't have as much of a barrier to widespread adoption.
So, you see educators and students kind of jumping in and saying I can use this a bit more practically. So, students were emailing their class notes around to each other in 1992. Nobody else was using email in 1992, but students were. Especially here in California, it was quite common.
The UC system had, I just remember that for me was the very first Internet experience, was really long before I really actively started programming on and understanding like TCP/IP. The very first thing was I remember I was in college and we had these terminals, rooms with terminals. Where we'd go get online resources for classes.
But then, somebody was like, no, no, no, if you go out "you can do this -- email Chris @something.edu." Remember? And you know you type in a line and it's like that's weird, that's bizarre, I can send a message. So, I think that the educators are the next ones to kind of discover the medium.
And then about the same time after that you have more robust early entrepreneurship. So, like people making money in Second Life, which is really starting to happen now. And then like groupware. Like, you know, businesses using it. But, they always use the new technology initially as kind of a group accelerator because you can usually do that under the radar of the IT system. You can do it in a covert way.
So that would be like the way businesses use text messaging today. If you look at how we use text messaging internally as a company, we don't have an official text messaging policy, but we just for the first time put text addresses like phone numbers into our personnel tool. Obviously, we're pretty avant guard as a company, but you're seeing people text messaging.
But, it's a way to make work a little bit better or more efficient and that's Immersive Workspaces. Right? I mean, actually Immersive Workspaces I think is a product maybe is a little bit more positioned as a bit more of a top-down thing.
But, if you've got somebody who's like, "Dude, let's not use Skype because there's five of us, we can sit around and look at a Web page too in Second Life. And the sound sounds just as good as Skype only better because it's 3D."
So, you have this little advantage that it delivers to a work group. So, I think we're in the middle right now of the beginning, or we're somewhere on the curve, of work group collaborative adoption and education adoption. So, that's like stage two or stage two and three or something.
And then the one after that is going to be more formal widespread business use, where it becomes more like a competitive imperative. So, that would be like when businesses really started adopting Windows NT broadly in the infrastructure. You just kind of move up to this point where ... Or Oracle or something, right? The CTOs or the CIOs were saying, "Yeah, we really need to use this database system because it's giving us competitive efficiencies."
So, I think that stage is totally yet to come for virtual worlds. We're not there yet at all. And then the one at the very end of the line, and then you've commented on this in your blog I think too. The one at the very end of the line is the one that everybody fantasizes about in the very beginning which is what I would call ecommerce, which is the final use of the new technology medium as a way of directly selling to the end user consumer of goods and services. So, that's Amazon.com in its full glory, which it's only been in for three or four years where it's really been at scale. It's been a significant commerce player in the United States.
That only happened after the Internet had matured all the way. And if you look at the earliest use of Amazon, it was that early entrepreneurship stage one, stage two thing that I was talking about, which is Jeff [Bezos] and somebody saying, "well, wait a minute now, it wouldn't be too hard to sell a book on there." You wouldn't need to see that much about it.
And that's like some of the things people are doing today in Second Life kind of looks like when Amazon was launching. So, I think you go through these stages.
Industry Standard: Let's talk about stage three when it becomes something that's pushed out to all the users and the company. What needs to happen for Second Life for that to really occur? I mean besides the fact that people are telling each other about it and people are becoming aware of it. What needs to happen?
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