Create an audience and builders will come

It occurs to me that the logic behind management at Lindenlabs is that the way to bootstrap SecondLife is to:

1. Create cool collaborative wiki world which will attract quality developers
2. Quality Developers will build content
3. Quality content will attract users
4. users will attract quality developers
5. And so on..


This is wrong.

Quality developers will not come where there is no audience.

Quality developers build for a living, and can not afford to give away their quality content for free. I'm sure Philip is living in an open source dreamworld that Mitch has no doubt sucked him into, but I promise you this is not how it will work.

If you want to get quality developers, you will need to provide them with an audience to sell to. A cool wiki world will be great at attracting unemployed students or hobbyists looking to get some experience, but it will not attract people who will find much more profitable pastures building PC games rather than bootstrapping some VR world.

Yes, tools *do* help, but those tools do not have to be that user friendly, they just need to be very powerful and very flexible. Quality developers will give up user friendly every day of the week for powerful and flexible tools.

So, when you're looking to attract better developers, the best way to do that is to provide them with an audience to sell to.

That will be your #1 marketing leverage to bringing them to SL to build quality content.

It will not be user friendly tools or the promise of some collaborative wiki world. In fact, the latter will probably scare them away.

Remember that sound that the adults made in the Charlie Brown movies?

That's the sound I am making right now.

By the way, if anyone wants the star on their belly removed, stop by our place in Amida. I have a Star-Off Machine. ~Sylvester McMonkey McBean

'cept that it's been working so far.

Damn that pesky reality.



I wonder if your aware of the numbers of 'quality developers' in SL, that find gainfull employment with some damn big name professional companies IRL because of their talent, that seem perfectly willing to contribute to SL.

I hope you're right, Reits, I really do.

I truly do pray that SecondLife survives, but I am less confident than I was a couple of months ago.

After the breakdown in late may, a lot of things went sideways when they should have gone up up up.

I also have very little confidence in the VP of Development at SL. He's building a world that might satisfy the wiki people, but between the glitches and other unnecessary user unfriendliness - not a world that attracts a real audience. Maybe if his technical skills matched his immaturity, things might be a bit different, but who knows.

There have been some positive moves lately. Integrating Snapzilla into the homepage was a masterstroke. Something which shows that someone at LindenLabs is a fairly able individual (love to know who was responsible for that).

However, SL itself is beta ware and we all have to start admitting it. There is one person responsible for this and someone needs to give him a deadline to either fix it or move on.

what's wrong with the wiki? are you suggesting its a bad idea for people to be able to improve the documentation?

i don't see the connection between LSL having wiki and lack of subscribers.

how will you get subscribers without having content. i don't see how this "bootstrapping phase" can be skipped.

secondlife is the currently the best virtual world. if you disagree, please post a link to a better one.

When the internet first started.. there were no graphics, no flash, no pizzaz.. Just a bunch of techno geeks sitting around sharing ideas and shaping a future, all in text or numbers. Look where we are now just over a decade later.

For those of us who believe that SL is the next step for the internet, I'd say we have a base that looks about like I would expect it.

With the internet, the people came first not the whiz bang features.

In fact, here we are, 2005, and the internet is still pretty devoid of whiz bang (mostly HTML).

KISS will bring in the audience, and the audience will bring in the developers.

ok.. so this is a "Which came first, the chicken or the egg" discussion? hehe.. Cool. I'll check back in tomorrow and offer my thoughts. Curious to see what others say too.

Yeah, this is very chicken / egg.

Is the audience the chicken or the egg? Not sure.

What I am sure of though, is that the audience can live without developers. For example, the mere socializing they can (and, frankly, mostly do) can attract more people.

However - quality developers doing quality work can not live without an audience.

1.7 is your UP, and 2.0 is your UP UP I hope


Blaze, I agree in some ways! More people would bring in more developers, but we have people already who are bringing is developers! It's not quite at the clip some of us would like, but it's getting there


The first task I think is stabilization. I think we need to stabilize the SL code at an acceptable level of features vs bugs/scalability.. 1.7 is the first step to stabilize Second Life.. 2.0 will probably be the second Step.. Once Second Life is at that point, the real work of attracting developers will begin.. I think that's one of the major reasons they hired David Fleck. I think we will see a boom in SL around Q2/Q3 2006


Right now, many of the developers we have are VERY talented! They are early adopters, which is only the first wave... There is already enough going on in Second Life to support thousands of people on a weekly basis..

Last time I checked, the audience didn't sit in the movie theater and wait for the movie to be made.

Interesting Blaze - what exactly makes him immature? It takes some cajones to call the VP of Development immature, especially with your constant antics in the forums.

Nope, someone got the balls to put some hard $$$ into something that might flop

Agreed, Hiro.

SL should make a couple movies and get people in here, and then we'll do the rest.

Maybe I am entirely missing the point, or the boat, or may be in the wrong thread but I think that LL has done a fine job of attracting developers to Second Life. perhaps too good of a job. If SL has nothing but talented creators it will become nothing but a bunch of content creators yucking it up (mainly to themselves) and patting themselves on their backs telling themselves how smart they are.

To succeed as an online "game" SL must attract a variety of people and not just nerdy little guys that are experts at writing in obscure scripting languages and connecting primitives. I may add that the ability to connect prims, and write scripts, does not confer on the builder any sense of design or a sense of place.

Before anyone thinks they need to flame me and question my mental state you must know that I am partnered with a very talented content creator and we operate a very successful business. All I want in SL is balance.

Susie,

What would the balance be? I am curious. In an environment like World of Warcraft, you have levelling up, monsters to whack, cool loot to obtain, so there is a built in premise for everyone playing. In SL, there is no such built in premise because the whole darn thing is user created. What would the balance be for those who don't create? My answer would be the balance is for the creative people to create things for those who don't want to create to do - to provide the levelling, the monsters, the cool loot metaphors. We do that to a degree now, but I am curious what additional thoughts you have.

Cristiano I think what I mean is that we need causal players who just want to socialize, go shopping and exploring without feeling the need to have to create things. If people want, they can learn to create or not, but I would like to see a broader audience to help keep Second Life in business.

I know there is no leveling or boss battles here but my greatest pleasures in SL have been sharing time with my partner and taking some time to smell the roses. We need creators here to make us roses to smell but don't forget the smellers of the roses.

You totally missed the point, dude.

Linden Lab is not a content developer. We developers are. The people who need to "make the movies" are us, the resident developers.

But moreover, I was using allegory to prove a point. If consumers have nothing to do, they won't stay.

You're right.. It might be just a little bit too early for that though.. I agree, we need to reach a point where people don't need to worry about making anything or not being able to find something they need..

Oh, I think the argument that LL is not a content developer is clearly false.

The question is not do they create content, but how much content do they have to create.

I think they need to create enough content to start the fire and we'll keep it going.

No, blaze, you're mistaken. Linden Lab builds tools, not content.

The most content I've seen is promotional, and that's hardly content. (Pony Linden, the Oil Rig)

And they're hiring a Senior Artist .. why?

http://lindenlab.com/senior-artist.html

There are thousands of hours of content built by LL or LL contractors. Waterhead, the new Welcome area, the city sims, roads, trams, trains, zone areas, prim attack, trees / ground textures / etc.

Again, the question is not "are they content developers" - they are pretty much by definition. The question is what and how much?

Physical interfaces of tools.


Marketing, user tool / marketing, experiment, tool, tool, tool, ?, marketing, tool

What he said.