Rosedale: But, you don't feel them. You can't talk to them. You can't say, "Hey, you guys! Who's on here today?" or, "Who's near me?" But, various technologies, and Second Life is one of them, create the ability to have presence, to have the presence of other living people around you in the experience that you're having with information. So, shopping is actually a good example of that. We do a lot of shopping online now, but we still do a majority of shopping in places that are populated in real time, by other people. There are reasons for that. Sometimes it's our friends, but sometimes it's not.
We also use the presence of other people as a cuing mechanism and a guidance mechanism in our day to day, walking to the market. There's a tremendous amount of stuff -- asking for directions, as has been joked: the difference between men and women. All of those type of activities, we take advantage of other living humans to get from information to information. The Web doesn't give us the ability to do that.
Now, it may be that somebody beats Second Life by coming with a kind of Web layer that makes everything live, but the example I always give is: when you're on Amazon.com, shopping for a camera, wouldn't it be nice...? There are 1,000 people at the same page as you, even at the same subpage, even at the same camera. There are five people looking at the same camera, right now. Wouldn't it be incredibly cool if you could talk to them, even just texting -- which I'd find as being adequately present if you can go, "Hey! Is there anyone there?" Enter. Yes, that's fast enough to be "presence." So, if you could talk to those people, you could refine your search. You could say, "Has anybody bought one of these cameras?"
There's stuff that you'd just naturally do that you tend to do even faster online than you do in reality. You won't walk up to and tap people on the shoulder -- some people will, tap people in the store. Online, almost everybody will tap somebody on the shoulder and ask a question. So, you have this accelerant of people being there with you.
The other reason why I say it will be bigger than the Web is just that the interface, once we do solve the design problems, you can get some brilliant 80 year old who's never seen the Web and put them in front of a computer with Second Life, and once they get over that initial, admittedly, "crawling over broken glass" hurdle of figuring out the interface, they're done. Right? Because they know how to walk, how to talk to people, how to follow a street, how to read a map, all of those things are things that they grew up doing.
But, if you put them in front of Google.com and say, "Oh, yeah. It's all there, just start typing," that's like a PhD that we've all gotten in the last decade. What we're missing, or what we gloss over, is the semantic complexity of how we navigate those Web pages, how we type in that text to Google, and how we follow those links and that we understand the difference between Craigslist and LinkedIn. That's a semantic complexity that some guy in India, who's a grand master chess player, but has never used the Internet -- I just don't know that he's going to go through the training process of multiple years of learning what all of those semantics are.
Industry Standard: On the official Linden Lab blog, there is -- I think probably your CTO -- a comment about tiered storage for Second Life. There are [3D] objects that need to be called up a lot. Maybe they are newer objects or things that are used a lot. Things that might not be used as much, if they are old objects that people have created. Can you talk a little bit about that?
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