M (LL's CEO) interview yesterday in SL

Metanomics did a 45 minute interview with Mark Kingdon: http://www.metanomics.net/index.php/show/setting_the_stage_in_conversation_with_mark_kingdon/

(Kingdon segment starts about a quarter of the way through the video).

My takeaways:

1. LL is adding social networking tools to SL. Think outreach direct from inworld to the web for "viral" social networking; Kingdon mentioned Twitter and Facebook as examples of the sort of tools that people are familiar with. Not clear to me if he means there will be direct interfaces to Twitter/Facebook, or Ll will add 2D social networking LIKE Facebook for SL.

2. New website coming next month. It, also, will put a foundation in place to reach out to other social media. Mentioned Twitter, plurk, flickr.

3. New, simpler, more intuitive 2.0 client coming (like OnRez? unclear). No web plugin client in sight.

4. Live music targeted as a popular "use case" for SL; changes coming within the year to support it better.

5. Most hiring next year will be outside the U.S.; expect servers in a datacenter in Europe. Judy Wade (VP Bizdev/Strategy) will be focusing on international market development. Localization (translation) will steadily expand.

6. LL not going public this year, but Kingdon went on to say that investors will expect a return on investment at some point.

7. RL business in SL is evolving away from brand recognition to collaboration/training (direct engagement rather than "reach" marketing). LL very happy with RL business response to their "behind the firewall" alpha.

8. Tom Hale (VP Product Mgmt) is hiring a product team to make it easier to start inworld businesses, particularly for content developers such as scripters and builders. Visible progress on that next year sometime.

9. Kingdon made vague statements about injecting new vitality into open source community.
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I have to read this. It looks like he got one thing right, in that live music performance (to small audiences because of technical limitations, alas) is probably the crown gem of what Second Life has to offer.

I also notice that:

He seems not to realize that the "social networking" buzz-phrase is passè- so last year.

The big changes seem to be things that take place outside of the virtual world of Second Life. The virtual world is no longer the big innovation- now, web-based interaction and web-based shopping is the wave of the future?

The investors are expecting a return on their money sometime. I guess the check is in the mail.

I wonder if the new task force to help inworld businesses was behind decisions like adult-content relocating, sudden new script limits, and new graphic changes breaking skins using transparency.

Clearly not.

But, but, but... isn't Second Life a social networking tool in itself?

easier??

Yes, but the vision seems to be that it is one among many, and that the more it's all tied together, the more powerful each social network method is. (Sort of Metcalfe's Law, innit?) I haven't gone looking for info on how this would work, but personally I could easily envision inworld profiles being enhanced with multiple links to facebook, myspace etc. profiles. I could also envision a way to directly export text from inworld to Twitter or blogs, if it doesn't already exist.

I'm sure that others of you have better ideas! Where's Ghosty?
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Yes, but it isn't easy to link to the other sites you use from inworld. Would be nice to have a way to link to Plurk, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr type accounts that you use as your SL identity through your profile. I use some of those sites as Nim, and it adds to my SL experience. There is the web page tab, but as I recall it only allows one link.

**edit: Nika beat me to it, and was more eloquent, as usual.

I believe some one has made a HUD that lets you do this with Plurk. There is probably one for Twitter too, though I'm not sure.

He & Elora are cruising...be back in another couple of days

If they involved inLinked they might get the sort of kooky business tie-in that they want.

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Didn't I read that Facebook deletes your account if you set it up as your avatar?

Ordinal Malaprop's got a hud called TwitterBox at her shop in Caledon.

You know what would be really cool? If we could make just-like-me avatars who could try on clothes in SL and then buy them in real life.

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Facebook is the one on that list I don't use, so I'm not sure and I should not have included it when I listed sites to link to. I've read that it is against their TOS to use them for anything other than your RL identity. It's possible they started going through the rolls and deleting avatar accounts.

Plurk offers Second Life as an option for "where you are from" when you register though.



Thanks!

plurkBuddy HUD 1.0

http://www.zonkster.com/plurk/

You mean, like, make a linkpage on a free web site and put a linkpage there?

I think that rather than deliberately targeting social networking sites in the profile (through, say, a "twitter" tab) they just let you add tags and content arbitrarily. Get rid of an explicit "picks" tab, or an explicit "partner" field... let people create the tabs and attributes they want and give them a way to embed in-world links (landmarks and slurls) and external links (web pages) and let them (a) do whatever they want to with them, and (b) pass them around in notecards or some new asset type... and see what people come up with.

Even better, let scripts see them. Click "add tag" to your profile and you'd get a popup with

+----------
| Label: Partner
| Text|v: Some Username
| Show in tab: [Second Life|v]
| Show on web
| Visible to scripts
| (_) Friends Only

Where "Text|v" is a pulldown that lets you select "text", "user", "landmark", "notecard", ....
And the tabs can be a pulldown, or you can type a new tab name in there.

So you can put your Twitter/Blogger/Livejournal stuff there, and a roleplayer can put Species/Gender/Level/Class/... and a scripter can put their Google Code and Sourceforge projects in there...

Second Life's success has been due to Linden Labs providing the tools and framework and getting out of the way of content creators. They need to apply that elsewhere...

LinkedIn, you mean?

It may not be interfacing to an established service, but to a Linden Lab 'clone' if you will. I would put my money on that. A user generated webpage at secondlife.com which is linked to your account.

Yes.

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I was reading where 60% twitter users quit twitter within the first month
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitter-quitters-post-roadblock-to-long-term-growth/

I love the ideas in both of these posts.

I don't mind the social networking types getting new toys to enhance their experience as long as there is a way to turn it all off for those of us who have absolutely no interest whatsoever in the MyFaceSpaceBookTwit stuff.

I don't want a dumbed down viewer either, maybe there is a place for one with new people but if that signals the death knell of the more advanced viewer then I am not going to be very happy at all

QFT

Maybe the retention rates for both would be higher if SL were involved.

Well, if we are to be the new social networking tool, we will probably get a name change to something like "Life Online"