Rosedale: Oh, no. Well, the other way it's going to be cracked is that -- so let's say you go [to] Tokyo. If I dropped you in Tokyo and I tell you to survive there, or even have fun, you'll be totally fine. Why? Because one in five people speak English. No problem. Same with thing with Chinese. So, it's not a problem.
In other words, if there are people wandering around in the virtual world, even if you can't read the signs, it's not going to be a problem, because you can ask somebody, just like in the real world.
But, on the Web, you cannot ask somebody, because there's no one wandering around when you're at that Website. So, I think that's another reason why Second Life, or virtual worlds in the most general form, will go across language boundaries. So, it's another reason they'll be huge.
But, I think that that will start to happen. We'll see. When we get to 50 percent of the people staying around, that's, I think, some sort of a sociological tipping point, because, if you go out with a bunch of friends today, will you tell them about Second Life?
Industry Standard: Some, maybe. But, most, probably not.
Rosedale: And the reason I think you won't is because I think -- I think we all do -- you have a natural psychological aversion to failure.
You know, intuitively, that, as exciting as Second Life may be, you know, intuitively, the fact that you just asked me to quote you a number on it, but you could have told me it was less than 50 percent. You know in your heart it's less than 50 percent.
Industry Standard: Right.
Rosedale: That's easy to ascertain. So, what that means is that you won't talk about it because it's a loser's bet. Less than half the people that are listening to you in your group of friends at dinner are going to come back a week later an say, "Man, that was so cool." The majority of them are going to come back and go, "I don't get it. Why do you think that's cool?"
Industry Standard: So, if it's closer to 50 percent, it's much easier to relate.
Rosedale: Then you can talk. And then, once you talk, then it undergoes hyper viral, just like anything else, like Facebook.
Industry Standard: Do you think we're going to reach that point in a year?
Rosedale: No. But, I think we'll think we'll reach it in two years. I just think that...
Industry Standard: Two years.
Rosedale: Yes.
Industry Standard: OK. So, you think the interface, or other things that are going on...
Rosedale: Yes. I think these are largely design problems. I mean, I could be wrong. It could turn out that we just don't crack that. But, I do feel like the Moore's Law curve of computing power, even on laptops, is giving us enough gain, giving enough advances in frame rate and stuff, we'll be able to get the launch time and the load time... I mean, that's another thing. A year from now, I'd like to see Second Life start up as fast as a browser. I'd like to have you in world that fast. I think when you double click on Firefox, or IE or whatever, you kind of go [pauses] and the page is up and stable? That should be the way Second Life works.
Industry Standard: Let's say even you double what you're doing now -- so it goes from 15 percent to 30 percent -- that has enormous implications on the scalability of the whole system.
Rosedale: Oh, yeah. We'll be making lots of money. I mean, yeah. We'll have more growth than we can handle at that point.
Industry Standard: Doesn't that set off alarm bells in your head?
Rosedale: But, I think we're doing everything we can to do the right things there. I mean, we're trying to architect the system in an open, standardized way, so that we can accelerate, for example, the rate at which servers are added to the system.
So we're constantly looking at how to open the grid up. Behind the firewall, we're working on Second Life systems that can run on different servers than our servers we own, to anticipate that kind of growth.
In fact, that's the primary problem. The primary problem is that the simulation space itself is CPU intensive. Not a problem, because it generates positive revenue. I mean, we're profitable, and the people using Second Life are profitable, so it's worth it to install those CPUs. But, nevertheless, this thing, much like the early Internet, much like the Web, it expands by the attachment of physical hardware to itself.
So, unlike like Facebook, there's a natural break on the rate of growth that's imposed by the fact that you literally have to build additional machines on the network. So, it's more like the growth of the Web, which was sort of steady but inexorable. It was just like, every month, you just got another few percent.
And I think that, right now, we're at like one percentage -- or not one percentage, but we're at whatever we're at. We're growing more like five to 10 percent a month. And I think that as we crack those usability issues, it'll come up some and it'll want to be even higher than that. And if you just scale those numbers out, they get really huge.
But I think the big problem will be putting servers online, and making the system scalable to that, and also making it have no central points of failure. And frankly, we've done a really good job on that.
I mean, I would love for us to have done better. And if you talk to Second Life users, they'll bang on it. They'll tell you that we're doing a terrible job on the staff. But, we're the only game in town. We're the only people doing this. Everybody's going to say that we're not doing it well enough. And there's going to be a subset of people who say we're doing great. I say that kind of naggingly, because it's very painful sometimes to be as emotionally connected to all this as we all are and hear people be so angry and say, "Why can't you do this better or faster or whatever?"
I don't know what to answer to that, other than to say I think we're a very good software development team. And this is a software development problem. It still is. It's not a marketing problem, and it's not a social problem. It's basically a design and engineering problem, at its heart.
And I think that the team of people that we have here, especially with Mark [Kingdon] and all the new people that are here, they're really good people: Tom Hale, Howard Look, and Brian Michon. These guys are very heavy hitters. We're going to do it as well as anybody else has done it. So yeah, I think we can get there.
Search needs to get a lot better. That's the other one I would call out. Like there's that new user experience, to the point where you're like, "OK. I'm comfortable with this." There's making the experience just more inherently delightful. I would love to see Second Life -- and I think this is totally doable. This is something I'm personally interested in working on.
When you move an object around in Second Life, if you ever try this, like if you pick up a physical object in world and you move it, it's like, "Yeah." It really is. If you have a high frame rate, it kind of follows you like a spring. It's so cool. You're like, "Yes. That is so neat. Whoo!" I can juggle things in Second Life. You get really good at it.
Industry Standard: You must be a pro. I can't do that.
Rosedale: But the rest of the interface, it's not fun. Walking around isn't fun. Flying is kind of fun, but the objects don't rez in in the right way. We can fix all that stuff.
So, I think, if we just make the actual experience of just being there more delightful, so that it's more like the iPhone -- you just log in and you're like, "Oh, man. That's just so cool. I just want to sit and look at flowers and goof around" -- that anyone who did it felt that way, I think we can achieve that. I think that's software and design, and I think we can do that.
And then I think we can make search really great. That's a concrete thing that I'd look out in a year. I mean, it's hard, and I hope we make lots of progress. But, if you look at how search works today in Second Life, well, it's just not very good yet.
Industry Standard: It's actually an improvement over two years ago.
Rosedale: Thank you. [laughter] It's true. But, come on. I mean, it could be fabulous, right? It could be really fabulous. We can look at where people are. We can look at people's pics. We can pull together all kinds of metadata and make the search work really well, where you just type in "live music" or whatever and you get something that really makes sense. And it's very Web like in its -- I don't mean in its presentation visually, necessarily, but in its scope, in the way we open it up to everything and we get all the data.
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