I’ve been reflecting back on how 2011 has been for Second Life. I didn’t make any predictions for the year, but on reflection, I believe it was a good year for Second Life. Perhaps the best year for Second Life that I can recall for quite some time.
Things aren’t perfect, certainly, and depending on who you are, you might think that some of the steps forward have been accompanied by a step or two back in other areas, but I do believe that, while Linden Lab hasn’t yet turned a corner, it is in the process of turning one.
A new CEO often runs into heavy resistance, with many staff digging in their heels and becoming recalcitrant and resistant to change. Now, I don’t know if that was the case when Rod Humble stepped in – it would be strange to think that it might not have, it being such a predictable sort of pattern – but things certainly changed rapidly. Far faster than I would have expected.
Within just weeks of Humble’s commencement at the Lab, the Lab seemed to kick up into high gear, producing large amounts of fixes and improvements – at a rate we’ve never seen before. Yes, some pretty major issues lay around far longer than they should have, and the Lab still seems to have problems with polish, attention-to-detail and follow-through, but I largely blame that on how the Lab’s culture of agile development has entrenched (rather than necessarily on agile development itself).
Customer service kicked up a notch in Humble’s wake, along with billing support, both areas that were in dire need of improvement. They’ve still got a ways to go, but they’re much better than they were.
Humble also tasked someone to revamp the signup process, and that has clearly been a success, judging by the sudden jump in completed signups after the rework. New user retention still seems to be rubbish, but that’s a separate issue. You don’t even have a chance to retain a user who never finishes the signup process. So, that’s a step in the right direction – it doubles the pool of users to potentially retain. Keeping them will probably not be a simple fix.
Second Life’s economy didn’t exactly boom, but it didn’t crumble either. There’s not really much wrong with being relatively stable, and the Lab did wind up with some record profits, so something is going right somewhere on the business side, as well as the in-world economy.
Mesh finally hit the grid and wasn’t a disaster. Actually, it really wasn’t much of anything as a number of factors mostly kept people away from mesh viewers, keeping the audience for mesh products fairly minor.
Somewhere in the background the Lab hired some people to work on some non Second Life projects. It’s nice that no resources are being drawn away from Second Life in the process, and it has been a matter of concern to me (from a business perspective) that the Lab has had all of its eggs in the one basket. As to what those projects are, I have no idea, but they do not seem to be the primary focus for Linden Lab, which is – as far as I can tell – directed firmly at Second Life.
The Lab also started working on giving us some tools that we’d long asked for, tools to improve automation, game-building, scripting and interactive content. What’s even better about that is that they actually did it in the way we had always asked them to do it – by eating their own dog-food – that is, developing the tools by actually attempting to use them to build something.
That ‘something’ was Linden Realms. I do not begrudge the Lab making Linden Realms widely available (as some people apparently do). Having done the work, it would have seemed like a demoralising waste to have simply shelved it somewhere or tossed away. At least there’s some use being gotten out of it quite aside from its primary purpose for developing and testing tools for content-creators.
It was a poor year for communication from the Lab. The worst I can recall in fact, but perhaps that will change in the coming year.
There’s still a ways to go, but I continue to be cautiously optimistic. I believe we have another good year in front of us, even though we can expect some inevitable missteps.
Namaste.
“It’s nice that no resources are being drawn away from Second Life in the process”
Not necessarily… I’m hoping the vampire-obsessed screwballs in Marketing get too sidetracked with Secret Linden Project to send out more spam, banner ads, and unrealistic machinima spots.
Happy 2012!
-ls/cm
I think having Linden Realms out there promoted to the entire community was important to seeing how LR handled the influx of people, allowing hem to see exactly how our own experienced would fair if 2000 people visited in LR in one day.
I suspect that after Mark Kingdon, the Lab was very eager to find a leader who came from a virtual worlds background. My take on Rod Humble is he’s just what the Lab needs. And hey, the addition of Will Wright to the board is incredible good news. It tells me the Lab has some leadership that is actually interested in Second Life.
Not much mention of Viewer 3? Even though the Lab has made improvements from Viewer 2, Viewer 3′s interface is still an annoyance to anyone using Phoenix or the original 1.23. I hope some day the Lab will recognize that it is possible to engineer selectable interfaces. Yes, it’s a pain and a lot of work to do this, but it is possible to make many changes that will make the present Viewer 2/3 functions and features acceptable to Viewer 1 users. I’d be willing to switch to Viewer 3 if it had some semblance of this compatibility with Viewer 1. Choose “Classic Interface” or “Newbie Interface”. Geez, there I go again.
So happy I’m not alone in feeling optimistic for our future.
On the communication upside, we have someone leading the company who can actually speak like a real person, not a marketing AI.
Overall, I can but concur – things aren’t exploding, but they’re contentedly stable, at a time when other general virtual worlds (as opposed to ones with a specific and supplied theme) have either “reoriented” or died outright. With any luck, the application of the lessons learned over SL’s time thus far can aid the Lab’s efforts in Secret Linden Project™. After all, for all that can yet be improved on with SL, there’s still nothing like it that’s survived, and not for want of resources.
Whilst we all have our wishlists (mine certainly including lower rent, and more flexible options, permitting “bursty” usage as required, with rent resting between a homestead and a normal sim), I’m enjoying the ride, and feel confident there are good things in store. Hopefully, including an iPad client, as threatened at SLCC – that would unquestionably rock. ^_^
Linden Lab under Rod definitely had a stellar year. Rod gets a lot of praise but there’s a lot of unsung at Linden Lab that really communicates with users well and make Second Life a lot better.
My favorite from this year has to be the content creation folks. Runitai, Charlar, Nyx, all seemed to work extra hard this year. Kelly did a great job too with the LSL folks finally delivering on new transaction APIs and a host of new LSL functions and revamps this year.
I’m sure the 90% of Lindens that don’t get a chance to communicate with us publicly contributed a whole lot to a successful year that’s not easy to credit them with, much thanks to them.
The community has been really great this year too.
Of bloggers Daniel Voyager has had a war reporter like zeal and this blog has been great as always. There’s starting to be too many blogs to keep up with but most of ‘em have been great.
Of TPVs I’m glad the Phoenix/Firestorm people delivered on mesh and are committed to trying to stay feature complete with new things in Second Life. They could very easily slack off or choose to support OpenSim more than the main grid but they’ve been more than fair with their support of Linden Lab. Much thanks to Kirsten and Jacek too who’ll be missed from viewer development.
And there was a lot of other good community stuff like YouTube tutorials, one of the most useful and appreciated being Ashasekayi’s mesh with Blender series.
And of course Maxwell’s organizing with the Qarl thing and everyone that contributed to the in-progress deformer project…
And a whole lot of other stuff.
Inside and out of Linden Lab, its been a pleasantly eventful year for Second Life for the most part. This community is awesome and I can’t wait to see what 2012 holds.
What was so good about this year for Second Life? Though I hope 2012 will be a lot better!!
Great blog post as usual, Tateru.
I think it’s been a good year in Second Life with many improvements along the way so far. I’m excited about the year ahead and hopefully things pick up in 2012 like the SL economy etc.
I hope Linden Lab will improve the new resident experience, bring back last names, add new exciting improvements and more.
I agree about the communication side of things because there has been fewer Linden meetings (user groups/office hours) this year than there have been in previous years which I’m not happy about. I used to love attending Linden meetings to find out whats the latest happenings on the grid. This year the lab have reduced and taken away almost all Linden meetings during 2011. I don’t log on as much anymore because of this.
It seems the lab are removing inworld communications with residents and moving it to social networks like Facebook/Twitter/Plurk. I want to see more user groups in 2012, Linden events and better communication. The monthly Linden blog updates I have noticed this year where in previous years it was every week I think. SL Flickr Pic of the Day posts I have found annoying because it takes up the blog activity section alot. This year I like the blog updates, places and upcoming events that are listed on the SL welcome screen.
Thanks Ezra for mentioning my blog.
Bring on 2012.
“depending on who you are, you might think…”
Yes well that’s just it, isn’t it ?
If The Lab has finally got round to fixing something they did that annoyed you, you might think it’s been a pretty good year. If on the other hand, you’ve been waiting three god damn years for them to put something right and you’re still waiting, or if you’ve ponied up cash to get a third party to come in to fix something that (yet again) was implemented half baked by The Lab, you’re probably going to have an entirely different perspective. You might also wonder what a “diversification” would mean for the core business.
Me, I’m pleased that there was no bankruptcy in 2011 and that SL is still around… and that’s about it
Happy New Year
Having a CEO with a great taste in football team was always a sure fire winner.
Things do feel better, they seem to be getting on with things, communication has been pretty damn awful and I’m talking about new features that have been developed that hasn’t been widely reported, such as improvements to the login screen, new scripting functions etc.
However a lot has been done, signups have been encouraging, retention still remains a challenge and I definitely feel agree that Linden Lab developing non Second Life products or services is a smart move for the company.
I wish I could be more optimistic about the future. LL has certainly taken some steps in the right direction, yet they’ve maintained their reputation for more missteps than progress, the poor communication, and abysmal marketing.
I’m still convinced that SL’s fortunes will not significantly change so long as LL ignores the importance of both presentation and engagement. These two vitally important areas have always been neglected by LL, due to both a lack of understanding and a lack of capability.
This year LL tried once more to address the problem of bad starter avatars. Some of the new starters look great (I’m particularly fond of the robots and vehicles) but their offerings for human avatars (which we can reasonably assume most new sign-ups will choose from) are as bad as ever. 2m tall with freakishly malformed proportions. (A user comment about this to Rodvik’s twitter was met with a confusing reply about avatar styles which seemed to show he didn’t understand the issue at all.)
The appearance editor is still obtuse and riddled with broken functionality.
Work on the social profiles, arguably one of LL’s biggest achievements this year, seems to have stalled out with none of the most important features (features that would lead to users becoming more engaged with people, communities, events and content in-world) they could have added implemented in any way, shape or form.
We got mesh, which is fantastic, but otherwise the content creation tools are unchanged and remain as buggy and unreliable as ever. Ex-Linden qarl has even created patches to fix some bugs (like the problems with Linden grass tools) and add new functionality (a prim alignment tool, something that should have been a standard feature in 2002) that LL has yet to add to their own viewer (or maybe they’re not able to due to laying qarl off last year?).
Most recently, the SL website has been redesigned in such a way that seems to show less of the grid’s potential to new users. A few bland screenshots including Linden Realms which, while a cute test bed for new features, is not a stellar advertising angle for various reasons.
I really want to see the Lab pull their act together and make SL, or a next generation virtual world, succeed, but I just don’t see them making enough improvements to show that they’re serious about it themselves.
Rodvik seems to have a better grasp of what SL needs to do to succeed than previous Linden CEOs, but there’s so much broken and missing when it comes to SL and I have to wonder how much resistance he’s getting from long time LL employees.
Maybe 2012 will be the year where I regain my enthusiasm for SL, but I’m not holding my breath quite yet.
@Penny Yes, there’s that follow-through problem. Features and systems that make it to a first-release and then seem to stall when it comes to completion and polish. That’s definitely something the Lab needs to work on – and I doubt it will be a quick fix. Of course, it is also true that the Lab has many competing priorities, in that almost every aspect needs work, improvement or polish… pouring more attention on one area would pull resources away from other areas that need to be brought up.
This is true. There’s so much that needs to be fixed it will take a long time for LL to put a dent in it.
I suppose that if I were in charge at LL I’d pick a couple major projects to push through to completion and put full time teams on those issues. Then I’d put a team together whose sole responsibility was pushing through “small fixes”, fixes for those problems that are really easy to fix and generally don’t get the spotlight that other, more complicated problems have yet affect the user experience as much or more.
This year has also proven to me that LL still hasn’t hired an internal design team. They desperately need one to make SL more appealing to potential users and smooth over the huge problems facing content creators.
I’m not sure how much work this would be, might turn out to be way too much work, or not feasible at all due to lack of enough data or somthing; but reading this gave me an idea of somthing that would be interesting if you could compile and post, it would be somthing like this:
A series of graphs showing the perceptions about SL from the general public, from the press, from the average SLer, from you and from LL as a whole as well as the guys at the top, regarding several areas (things like customer service, performance, stability, attractiveness etc) over time; somthing like on a scale from “can’t get any worse than this” to “Perfection” (with “not bad but not good either” in the middle). For the months (or weeks or whatever) that doesn’t got enough data you could just interpolate between the surrounding points and draw the line kinda grayed out; and to show expectations at the time, draw a straight dashed line from each point showing the direction seemed to believe the “goodness” of that area was gonna get next (dashed so if it overlaps with what happened it doesn’t disappear), perhaps the same color but semitransparent or with a outline, or plot the optimism/pessimism for each areas as a separated line.
[...] Bloggers usually publish their 2012 wishlist (and an analysis of 2011) around this time of the year. Well, I’ll skip it for 2012. [...]