Interesting article by the Linden Lab CEO, Philip Rosedale

"Alter Egos", http://members.forbes.com/forbes/2007/0507/076.html

I think you have to register to view it. I won't quote any of it here since I don't know if that's allowed.

for those of you who would rather not give their information to forbes here's an exact copy/paste of the original.





Special Report
Alter Egos
Philip Rosedale 05.07.07



Second Life is a hot place to try out new business ideas

With a growing commercial real estate business, you are meeting with your people around a huge mahogany table to discuss a proposed art gallery. Everyone looks fairly human, but someone is wearing a fox suit, and there's a guy who looks like one of those colonial marines from Aliens. You can learn a lot about everyone this way--by seeing whom they have chosen to become with a few mouse clicks. You ask whether a particular piece of property has yet been developed, and the person next to you vanishes into thin air and reappears 60 seconds later with a report; he has just gone "there". Through the windows you can see a gigantic blimp cruising by, trying to steal your employees with video ads of job offers. It can't come into your office, but it can hover at the edge. A model of the gallery floats in the center of the table for everyone to inspect.

You are the only one in the group who lives in the U.S. Your most trusted partner is someone you've never met face-to-face: a 20-year-old woman from Portugal. There is more laughing and fun than in a normal meeting, and bad ideas don't live as long. The room is paneled with live screens showing every detail of the business and painfully accurate readouts of how everyone is doing with different aspects of the project. You have known them only a few months and probably won't work together longer than another six, but you will have learned more about collaboration, communication and culture than you would in a half-dozen years in New York.

This isn't the Matrix, but it's in the same neighborhood. This virtual world, where 3-D software and broadband networking let you download a small application that transports you to the surface of a new planet, is a digital re-creation of reality, where everything you see, like the Web, is owned and created by hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. But unlike the Web, this is a living space filled with other real people behaving much as they do in the real world. In other words, it's a lot more than a videogame. It's a place where real companies and real entrepreneurs can try out new product designs, hold press conferences and get feedback from customers. You can go on to Second Life and test-drive a Toyota (nyse: TM - news - people ) Scion.

In the world of Second Life, a rich network connects innovators and their ideas to help each other create better products. Here, a Los Angeles toymaker prototypes new toys; a violinist from London becomes a successful virtual architect; an entrepreneur sets up a business to create real-world 3-D replicas of your avatar (or onscreen alter ego) to sit on your desk; and a Brooklyn supermarket manager quits his job to design virtual clothing full-time using the name Crucial Armitage. Second Life has become a sort of singles bar for entrepreneurs--an inexpensive place to test your ideas and show your results to other like-minded people.

How do you join? Go to the site, register with your avatar and go to an orientation island to meet other new members and find out how to navigate, dress yourself and buy and sell virtual goods and services. You can buy an island and set up a golf course, movie theater, hotel, summer camp--to have fun or make real money.

There's a virtual economy underlying this phantom world. To buy and sell things, you first acquire Linden dollars on the Lindex, a currency exchange market: Hand in a real U.S. dollar (via PayPal or a credit card) and you get 266 Linden dollars. That's a free-market price determined by supply and demand, just as in the real-world market for yen and euros.

What would L$266 buy? A couture outfit, a car, a pair of boots, a sofa or a small house. A 16-acre island costs $1,695 of real money; from there you can promote real goods and services.

Every object in Second Life starts with a cube--a.k.a. a "primitive," or "prim"--that you can stretch or bend into any shape; we provide the 3-D modeling tools. If you create a pen, say, you can choose to copy it for sale. Your buyer's Linden dollars go into your virtual account. To pull real dollars out of Second Life, you can sell them on the Lindex. Over the last year the number of people receiving money for goods and services from others in Second Life has jumped sevenfold to 209,000. Recently the total (virtual) money supply was L$1.9 billion.

The real-world San Francisco firm that developed SL, Linden Lab, gets its real dollars in three ways: selling virtual real estate (islands, plots of land, a city block, for example); monthly fees, which range from $10 to $295, to "maintain" a piece of property; and a small fee on currency exchange transactions. Participants who merely visit without owning property pay nothing.

The world inside the host computers is an ideal environment for entrepreneurs, who can expect low barriers to market entry, few natural monopolies and an ability to rapidly develop new ideas that can turn into real products and services. American Apparel, for example, opened a store that let members' avatars try out clothes--and, via a link, to buy them in real life.

Transparency and reuse of content make Second Life more hospitable to innovation than real life. It is very easy to see how your neighbor's business is doing and to share product ideas. Many interactive objects in Second Life (for example, a wristwatch with moving hands that tells the correct time) are built on small chunks of scripted code that can easily be passed among builders. For just about every interesting type of interactive content, there is someone hosting a "sandbox" with free examples that innovators can work from. Second Life is being built not just by the dozens of programmers employed by Linden but also by the thousands of computer-skilled participants who have contributed bits of code.

Flying machines in Second Life illustrate the point. In early 2004 Linden released a set of programming interfaces that would allow users to take any object you were sitting on and turn it into a "vehicle." It could move over the ground or through the air while realistically responding to mouse or keyboard controls. We released two very primitive vehicles--a motorcycle and a flying surfboard--that were freely transferable between users and contained programming code (in the Linden scripting language, which is comparable to C++) that everyone could examine. It was very easy to pop the hood and start making changes, modifying the hoverboard, say, to fly like an airplane. That's just what was done by an intrepid software writer working under the screen name Huns Valen. He created a Flying 1.0 program that modified our original examples to allow nice airplanes to be made--and gave it away.

Three years later thousands of derivations of those original programs exist. There are vertical takeoff and landing aircraft with heads-up displays--think of those simulations on fighter-jet screens--and rocket launchers. You can buy a glider or fly a dragon with wings. Although the physics simulation currently in Second Life isn't accurate enough to help design real airplanes, it's easy to imagine how this might be possible in the near future.

Information about how to modify and create ever more sophisticated machines spreads quickly in Second Life. For every clever new idea, at least one designer is willing to serve up his code for the fun of being remembered as the guy who seeded the design community. For example, within weeks of our introducing heads-up display technology a designer screen-named Yadni Monde started giving away an editable "emote" heads-up display that lets your avatar change facial expressions. Such altruism can pay off: You might parlay a giveaway into a great programming job.

Second Life competes in many ways with the real world, offering better ways to collaborate, meet people and build things. In the past few months 4,000 IBMers have flooded into Second Life to brainstorm, hold meetings for workers dispersed around the globe and prototype new shopping experiences for customers. Starwood Hotels (nyse: HOT - news - people ) tried out its upcoming Aloft hotels by building one in Second Life and hosting virtual parties where "guests" wandered through the hotel and gave design feedback. Most inspiring, thousands of people from all over the world are making a secondary income, creating businesses and selling things in Second Life with no more required of them than their own ingenuity and a PC. With the introduction of new technologies like 3-D voice, which will let SL residents speak to each other, and Web integration, the virtual lab, with its low costs and cross-fertilizing possibilities, becomes an ever more attractive alternative to old-fashioned reality.

Philip Rosedale is the founder and chief executive of Linden Lab, which produces Second Life.

You rock.

After losing the land I bought for "fun" to an apparent glitch in the system... I don't think SL is viable for business.

After having crashed a dozen times in the last two days simply trying to stay inworld long enough to put one simple product up for sale, I would agree.

As a web developer for enterprise-level associations, I was beating the SL band wagon at work all last fall. I'm not doing that any longer, and frankly I wince when anyone at work asks about SL because this is NOT a ready-for-prime-time product. At best, it's beta.

There is no way I could maintain any professional credibility by advising one of our clients to explore SL for their organization. It's too buggy, too unstable, and the customer support is substandard. And most unsettling is that the viewer/grid problems get worse with every supposed "improvement."

well you can look on the bright side... many peopel dread the coming of corporations and well since SL truly isn't really ready to handle them reliably present content creators have absolutely nothing to worry about hehe

I actualy like SL but I would not promote it to anyone as a way to get any type of business presence in the real world although I did toy with the idea (and still am) of setting up a real world type thing for my own amusement but that is as far as it goes..

Its a great set of lego i love it nothing beats it but until they solve their stability issues its a bad idea to suggest it hehe (although actuay it was more stable last year...)

I totally agree with Beebo says here, the customer support is substandard.

The place described in Philip's article sounds interesting.

Anyone here ever tried it? How do you join?

That was funny. I needed that after today.

I love the bit about test driving a Toyota, why would anyone buy any car after driving it in SL?
"Yes Maam, the RL version spins out of control and throws you face first into the road everytime you cross a postcode boundry too"

yes serious biz looking like fox mc cloud and that dude from aliens YAY!!



only if you can cram it into quicktime and or shoutcast, using outside servers, software and programming trickery in some cases, simple things like pdf and html are non existant



its all stored on one central service, where if they fail tommarow your 100% propitary content on their system disapears with them



but it will NOT handle or drive like the real thing, with limited physics that basicly amount to gravity and reflected force, horrable server lag, and poorly executed collision detection

you can drive your toyota 300mph tru a house, but not accross a server crossing on the road

besides you cannot make a physical object more than 31 primitives, want a driver make it 30, and you want passengers -1 prim for each, you can seriously do better with java, which would actually let you model your car in full 3d (not just a box with 2d images) with no software download install signup fees lag ect




and as many as you dam well please to inflate our population numbers



that will sexually herass, shoot, cuss you untill your so discusted you cant stand it anymore



from a 3rd party non offical group formed by members becuase linden labs documentation is at worst, non existant, and at best limited


for about 2 grand (us) but yet you cant buy first land so the small guy can get a place to even start



jack crap



again does joe small guy really need 16 acres for a dress shop?



that causes so much server lag (as a whole) you cant walk accross your house




if you dont mind upto a 15 second delay, and dont mind crashing and loosing your vehicle on every server crossing



and was quickly replaced with something that actually moved more like a vehicle, and less like a hockey puck



nor is it accurate enugh to drop a ball into a cup, near future means the 3 years they have been "trying" to upgrade from havoc 1 to havoc 2 (eventho havoc 4 is starting to gain some age)





no thanks to linden labs, they provide no offical documentation




which is now delayed



which has been delayed for years




and probally hasnt steped foot in it for more than an hour in the last 4 months

try more like 6 months aleast! if not more.

I try

Well thats nice..all he talks about are people who are here to get rich and make him rich in the prosess. What about the rest of us? Who just have a small store, or who make nothing only buy from others? We are not all entrepreneurs. He makes it sound like some don't even exsist.
"Second Life is a hot place to try out new business ideas"
Makes it pretty clear who he is worried about makeing happy huh. And sad to say..it's not us little guys.

Looks around the room all confused and screams, "Dam/n it! I'm lost again!"
(Good one SuezanneC)

Makes ya wonder how ol Phil would feel were he to read this. Or any Linden to read this. So much for your dream Phil..You remember your dream don't you? Phil?


Shame on you Linden Lags. Aside from the fact that, unless flagged by a moderator..this will never be read by a Linden. Ever. SL Mentor" Sir! The peasants are revolting!!!" Voice of Lindenlags "Yes..Yes they are."

Trouble, oh we got trouble, Right here in River City! With a capital "T" ...........

You sure that wasn't an interview with Professor Harold Hill?

The Lindens as you know don`t read the forums. Too many times a few linden came in and looked for problems causing problems themselves. But really Philip should stick his little nose in here from time to time.

First life contract enforcement and verification of identity are very big barriers to entry for all reasonable first life business ventures. At the moment the only advantage I could reasonably define is perhaps brand recognition. Having said that is also must be commented many SL avatars actively dislike first life corporate presence and never visit their sites.

In addition many people seem to have the current view that SL is entirely separate from FL and never the two will meet.

One final comment about virtual physics, lag, prim creation, and movement with vehicles....

Why is it when I stand or move around in Darnassus, Ironforge, or Stormwind, lag is non-existent, movement is easy and swift, and the graphics and buildings are stunning?

Of course there are hordes and alliances of avatars in fairly large numbers all interacting away

I suspect the peice of the post made by Phillip that was edited out, went something like this...

llSetScene01

llSoftvoice starts off in llwhisperChannel999, llGetLouder >0.05
llReadThoughts {llGetOwner=PhillipLinden}
llCompleteDreamState {Current_Voice=MrsLinden}
llRead+StoreText
llTextReadout=SecondLife_Forums=True, {Edit-llCompleteDreamState_Comments}
llEditedText= {"Phillip Darling... Hunny..... Time to get up... you haven't been to work in like 6 months, it's is time to go visit the ant farm at Linden Labs"} llEndEditedQuote {llInsert Var_Realtime+6months+llTimeLapseSincePostMade}

llReset=ReadThoughts {llGetOwner=PhillipLinden}
llReset=llCompleteDreamSate {Current_Voice=MrsLinden/BanAccount}
llResetEyes=llGetOwner=PhillipLinden

} end

Good night Phillip

If I had a business to use a virtual world as a communications system for my employees, I would not want them to connect to a publicly accessible looney bin like Second Life.

I'd want their real names displayed, and the name of my company, and the employee's job title. No goofy names like BlangoZango DoodleWhack. They'd not need to be buying virtual goods like particle chains and whips and all the other stuff folks do in SL. They would need to be able to easily hand each other business documents like spreadsheets and pdf files.

Be that as it may, there is one thing I think is definitely cool about this article, which is that Huns Valen got his name in Fortune magazine. Isn't that neat? I can't believe I don't have a good picture of Huns's avatar and can't find one on the internet easily.

Is that an article that would be in a paper magazine?

1) There is no physics in WoW.
2) The entire world is static and unchanging. Everything is already installed on your hard drive and doesn't need to be downloaded.
3) The level of interaction between characters in WoW is extremely limited.

I'm not defending LL, but comparing the two is like comparing an orange to a watermellon. Both are fruit, but very dissimilar.

I am a moron.

I switched windows to my gmail inbox and noticed at the top of the screen 'your message has been sent, click here to view your message'. What message? I thought - I've not been home long and I'd swear I haven't sent any. So I click here to view my message - it starts:



OMG SOMEONE IS USING MY ACCOUNT TO SEND OUT SPAM ABOUT SL OMGOMGOM- wait, no, that's the article I emailed to myself this morning because I can't read the forum from work, and apparently I never closed the window...

*headdesk*

also their content designers are professional, not some random yutz using a 1 megapixel image for something that takes up less than 100 pixels on screen

I play WoW. The low detail, smeared, low resolution texture builds make my eyes itch sometimes. Compared to the level of detail of one single crafted club-goer in SL, it pales.

What WoW has isn't better graphics, what it has is a solid, consistent art direction. There are no avatars in WoW that can compare to the ones possible in SL. My warlock doesn't even have legs