Puff and Circumstance

 The piece on the Guardian by Glyn Moody about "Second Life's New Ruler" stirred the usual bland reaction across the blogsphere. Some called it positive, but really it is just more of the same old puff and circumstance about the virtual world. Another bit of coverage with more of the rehashed noise from Kingdon that we have seen for the last year since he joined the wacky world of Linden Lab. (btw Glyn---Kingdon started on 5/15/08 so, is a year in a job really make someone new?)

Generally I have not been too interested in following the spew news from Linden Lab. It seems to me that largely no one cares about what the Lindens are doing or where Second LIfe is headed. It's a marginalized and eccentric thing (game or platform or technology??). Most residents just take what they can get without much hope that SL will actually be anything more than it currently is. Which is not nothing btw. There is still a lot to do in SL (check our cool enough directory of places here).

Yet, there is still a bit of passive curiousity about what goes on at Linden Lab. Since the openspace rip-off, LL has locked-down all information about anything that would expose the impact of this mess. No real statistics about the "land mass" or new user retention are shared. We can only guess that it is because there is no good news to share--so LL seems best to just shut-up.

So, the noise is the same from Kingdon. What continues to dismay me is how the "press" sucks up the puff and just tosses it back out. The Guardian aspires to more than just reccycling press releases--but once again in the case of the virtual world delivers whatever the technocrats put forward without challenge.

Of course the normal PR process is at play here. Kingdon comes to London on a "tour" and their dutiful PR agency Lewis PR went out and tried to secure some meetings and some coverage. They would also carefully prep each writer on what the story is, while carefully avoid sensitive topics. But should jouranlists dig a little? Gly Moody just took the whole thing hook line and sinker. Aren't there any curious editors over at the Guardian?

A couple of things that even a journalism student in a high school might have asked--

* says Kingdon: "I see what a phenomenally brilliant business model Second Life has. If you're a social media property today, your biggest challenge is figuring out how to monetise it. Because the experience and the economy are so closely linked, Second Life doesn't have the problem that other social media properties have." Which begs the question: what is this business model really all about? LL sells virtual land. So if this is so successful than how much land has been sold in the last year? How much land is being abanndonned? What are these other revenue streams that facebook, twitter have not been able to make work? Second LIfe also has tons of other problems that Twitter does not have--like a massive IT infrastructure. They have something like 5,000 servers to support 640,000 "claimed" users. Ha that don't look too scalable Glyn.

* Glyn cites: "Altogether, he's hired 100 people since joining Linden Lab last May." Gee that would make Linden Lab one of the few companies in the entire world that is growing its staff base. Er, why? And what about the people that have left LL? Is that 100 more people or just new people? And...why does it take 100 new people to make the system 50% more available? Is it because the underlying architecture and deployment is such a giant mess?

* Concurrency. So is 86,000 concurrent users good really? How does that compare to other MMOs? To Xbox? Sony Home? And what is the benefit to other users about this concurrency? How many areas do the average avatar actually visit? Is it just one or two? Or is there a great need for movement and interaction across the sprawling grid? Or is concurrency that only thing that is growing--so the only piece of up news that Kingdon can toss out?

*  Kingdon tosses out: "I'd like to see a Second Life that, instead of 640,000 active users" - today's figure - "has 6 million active users." Well, first where does this number come from? Users must mean unique humans access the system. Active users should then be people that are doing something er...active like shopping, engaging in events of some sort. How does Linden Lab get to this number? There have been reports of 10% of the sessions being bots of some sort. How much of that is inside the concurrency? Is it the same 10% or is it 50%? What is Kingdon's projection of the porno grid in relation to the these numbers. Will the porno grid by 80%  or 10% of the "active users"?

* Here's another unchallenged statement: Kingdon cites two main reasons for companies' renewed interest in Second Life. "One is that a younger generation of worker is very tech-savvy, accustomed to using very flexible tools to communicate, collaborate and share. Then there's the tremendous pressure on businesses to be eco-friendly, not to travel as much and not to build physical buildings." Well, what supports that there is renewed interest? What tools are there in SL that are flexible or better than skype? Is Second LIfe targetting younger users now? What is the new median age for users? Where are they seeing more avatar creations by country?

* Then about the inside the firewall product Moody says: "This allows companies to run a Second Life server on their own intranet: they can still connect to the main Second Life world, but it provides them with a virtual space where confidential discussions can take place." Well, there is no public factsheet about this product, so how can the Guardian say it works this way?  Exactly what "server" runs on the intranet? How are assets managed? What about avatar control (logging) inside and outside of the firewall--there are lots of questions here for sure.  From the Second LIfe blog we get: "Yes, this is a server solution that is completely disconnected from the main Second Life environment with all of the rich functionality in the box." This solution also has a lot of competitors, so why is the SL version better? How many companies are using it etc...(some info is on the SL blog now).

* finally Glyn--you let him off with this comment: "And we're a very nice and profitable company." This is something we have heard Kingdon say for the last year. So how profitable? $1? How much revenue? What is trend? Where is growth areas? What about overall investment in gettng SL to where it is? What has been the total cash investment in the business to date? What does the balance sheet look like? Certainly as a private company Linden Lab does not have to disclose any of this, but if it is a major statment to validate the offerings--well I don't see how a journalist can just reprint such a  statement without back-up facts.

But then again who really cares about where Linden Lab and Kingdon are headed? He looks about as bored with himself in the photo as Glyn and most of us already are.