Rosedale: That's the problem, right? I mean, how many hours are you willing to spend prepping for an experience which is listening to a band? How many? I mean, 30 minutes. You call or go online to get the tickets, call your friends, meet. So, we have to get the experience of logging in to Second Life and getting to that event, after you got like an email or an IM or something from a friend, down to 15 to 30 minutes.
And today, the statistical estimate that we kind of throw out there is several hours. So, for you to really get acclimated and get to a live music event is several hours away. So, even if you total the hours, so you're probably not going to do it yet.
So, going back to your question, we need to collapse the orientation experience on learning the interface down to a 30-minute timeframe. And we're not there yet.
Industry Standard: Is that a question of improving the way that you're educating people or actually changing the interface?
Rosedale: I think it's both. I mean, I think that the experience of which things you're walked through and what the essential elements of what the initial user experience are, which is a narrative content sort of thing. I think, we definitely have to change that. There is abundant evidence that people are trying different experiments. You look at them and say, "Hmm, one of these things is going to finally go."
But, I also think that the basic UI of the software also needs to change. It has too many pixels. People are not smart enough to absorb the amount of information Second Life throws at you. It's just daunting.
Industry Standard: What do you mean by too many pixels?
Rosedale: What I mean by "too many pixels" is that there are too many letters, numbers, buttons, and symbols on the screen at any given point in time for you to really understand. And they're all kind of demanding your attention -- your [Linden] dollar balance, your inventory window, all the buttons on the bottom bar, chat and text that are visible in the window, that's asking something of you, blue pop ups that are coming up. All of that stuff taken as a whole at any given moment is pretty overwhelming.
So, I think that -- and we're very much engaged in this -- there's a design process here and we're whittling that down from ... I mean, it's kind of like going from, if you remember the first MP3 players, they had a lot of buttons and stuff. But, at some point, everybody realized "Well, this one you don't really need and this one you can hide until you have to do this one." So, we can kind of get it down to a volume control and track selector. You know, simpler. So I think that there are just some basic work like that that we have to do.
And it isn't easy because you can look at all the other products that are out there and some of them, even though they have a different reason for being than Second Life does, like games or like [Google] Lively or IMVU or Gaia [Online] or [3D] environments that have a sort of similar final amount of complexity in the interface, like what you can be able to do.
You can see people doing experiments on this. And the only thing I would say is that, from watching all those products and ours too is that it's not simple. You know what I mean? It's not like a no brainer to just distill the complexity of the interface into two or three simple steps.
One of the reasons that virtual worlds are growing linearly and not like hyper linear, like Facebook or something, is that it's just pretty hard to solve these design and engineering problems.
And the other thing is that there's kind of a "meet in the middle" thing, I think, where I think - and I was alluding to this earlier - I think some people look at virtual worlds and say, "there's way too much going on here." They look at Second Life and they say, "99 percent of this people don't need." I think that's dead wrong.
I think that if you build -- because I think the experiments, like [Google] Lively as an example, there are experiments of plenty where people have said, "You know what? I don't think it's about creating content. I think it's just about exploring some rooms that your friends build from catalogs of 100 objects."
The UI for that is so much simpler. There are only 100 couches to choose from. Awesome. Right now, I can put them in a little poster view of 10x10. When you hover them I can skin them. I mean, I can do all sorts of cool stuff with that interface. Great! When I want to move the couch around the room, since I know there's only a type couch, type chair, type stool, I can build code around that and custom build. I mean, I move that couch and it slides around and it's so cool how it automatically orients itself.
You look at that and you think, "That's so much simpler than Second Life." That will run. That will get people right in there. They'll start using. They know.
Industry Standard: Now, I'm going to bring up an example from something we discussed earlier, and that's Webkinz. Webkinz has this type of format where you can choose only certain -- I mean, they have an inventory. You can't customize anything.
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