Rosedale: In general, obviously, we let people build really as much as they want and store it in their own inventory. Then, what's resident in the world and viewable by other people is a subset of that data. I think what is resident in-world is on the scale of, maybe a little less than a hundred terabytes of data? By the way, that is just a staggering amount of data.
That is one of the things that makes Second Life so special. The amount of stuff that is actually in people's potential inventory is two or three times that. I think I should look that ratio up for you. I think the ratio is even larger. People's willingness and desire to create content is pretty much unfettered. I think that one of the things that Second Life shows about human behavior is that we are all a lot more creative than our current real world environment gives us opportunity to be or credit for.
In entertainment, there is a conventional maxim. When you talk to people who start start up companies, they're trying to do things that entertain people, there is generally this assumption that has gone into, I think, many, many companies over the last couple of decades. They have said "well, a very, very vanishingly small percentage of people are interested in being creative as a form of entertainment." We would say that being creative in some manner is actually itself entertaining.
The conventional thinking has been that almost no one has that bizarre property. It is much rarer than being left handed. It is extremely rare, and the majority of people want to passively consume content. The Web, in its sort of original bibliographic form, television and books are examples of that world. We kind of take a somewhat user driven, but largely passive role in consuming content. I think that there is a misunderstanding there. I think it is a cause and effect thing.
I believe that human beings are intensely entertained by creativity, whenever they can find a venue in which they can actually do it. Unfortunately, but understandably, the way technology has structured the world, particularly over the last few decades, has been to make it very, very easy to broadcast content, meaning that we just have no choice but to largely be in a passive or consumptive mode.
When Second Life was really small, and there was only a thousand people using it, we would look at what percentage of people's time do they appear to be noticeable? It's hard because Second Life is so open ended. We would look at the data and try to measure, "what percentage of people's time are they spending creating versus consuming?" It was something like 30 percent creating and 70 percent consuming.
We said to ourselves, "well, surely as Second Life matures and a more normal mix of people, so to speak, are using it, that 30 percent is going to go down to one." Because, that's what everybody says. In some sense, we'll know that the usage of Second Life is mature when that number has dropped to one.
What we saw, then, over the last five years, was that the amount of time that people spent being creative really didn't drop very much at all. In fact, I don't even know what it is now. We stopped looking at that as a useful statistic. In fact, it seems that people want to spend a large percentage of their time being creative. It is almost like, if you see the number dropping, you can almost assert that the Second Life toolset is too hard to use, not that people don't want to be creative.
I think that there is the great thing about virtual worlds in general, which is that they finally give us the opportunity as people to discover what the balance is. How much of our environment do we want to create? If you look at the typical avatar of a typical house, for business, or anything else in Second Life, what you see is way more diversity of content than what you see in the real world.
What does that tell you? It tells you that, given the choice, people will continue to customize their environment to a point where it's almost one to one. It's almost like everything is a one off artwork. That would be the limit case. The real world today is a case that is driven by the economics, distribution and manufacturing conditions of the real world, which has it that most things we have in our house have been replicated thousands or millions of times.
I just think that the conventional thinking that brand drives people to really want the same bleached, stark chair that I see at all my friends' houses. There's not bleached, stark in all of them. But, the same thing from Wal Mart, or the same thing from that Swedish company ...
Industry Standard: IKEA.
Rosedale: IKEA. Again, the thinking that that's what people want, in their hearts, is somewhat wrong. If you look at Second Life, it really proves that. It's not actually what people want. People want to be quite distinctive and creative. The environment in Second Life demonstrates that that's true.
Increasingly as it grows, and as business use grows and everything else in Second Life, it's hard to argue that it can't be. It's got to be a reasonably normal cross section of people, and increasingly so. And so it's uplifting for me to see that little creativity space.
Industry Standard: Let's compare your virtual world vision with the way the Internet was, probably 15 years ago. A lot of people, and probably you did, too, started on something called Gopher. It was like a menu driven way of navigating the Internet, and that limited, how many people could use it or how many people might really realize the power of [the Internet]. Then the Web browser came along and that's changed everything.
Are we at a stage, right now, with virtual worlds, where there is some invention or application out there that we need in order to reach stage three or stage four that you were talking about?
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