Robin Linden On The Issues

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This week's guest on Metanomics was Robin Harper, (known as Robin Linden in Second Life), the Vice President of Marketing and Community Development for Linden Lab. You can view the video or download the audio via the links above, as well as subscribe to the feed over at SLCN for all future events.

The following recap of the event comes to us courtesy of Jenn Hienrichs, owner of the popular "Things To Do" and "The Best Of Second Life" groups.

History

Robin received her MBA in marketing from University of Chicago, and started her career working with packaged goods. From there she eventually made her way into gaming and virtual worlds.

This shift from packaging to games began when she started to work with Nintendo in the late 80s as the company launched Game Boy and Super Nintendo. It was there that she fell in love with games. She left advertising and spent the 90s working on Sim City and the Sim brand — and working with a text based world. While looking for further opportunities she found Second Life in March of 2002. She saw in Second Life characteristics of Sim City and the powerful and emotional benefit for players to create something of their own.

She discussed how Linden Lab approached business development originally, and how it has evolved, stressing that "titles aren't important, but how we manage their customers is" and making sure they have what they need. Robin described how the word customer became "resident" because of the high degree of community involvement in SL. It's a balancing act between running a business and letting the residents run the world.

On the Issues

Robin described some of the challenges that face residents, touching on topics such as business disputes, zoning, and privacy in an environment that's constantly changing. Group limits, mainland, voice, and JIRA also came up. Here's her view on those topics:

1. Group Limits: Group tools were built in 2002, mostly in a social format. As SL grew and people bought land, groups became tied to land ownership. As business groups began to use the tool, Linden Lab expanded the way in which groups could use roles. It's something that expanded beyond social use, and LL increased the number of groups from 15 to 25.

   Voice brought more group tools such as being able to voice chat within a group and voice IM. Going forward Linden Lab needs to give the residents the ability to track revenue, pay employees, and do market research through the group functions. Perhaps a web service and an API can be created so residents can track their groups on the web. Linden Lab is discussing the design of these tools and Robin says that she'd love to see this in 2008, but won't make promises.

   When asked about raising the group limit, she talked about the evaluation that will need to be done before LL can decide how it should proceed.

2. Mainland: Linden Lab will maintain a long-term commitment to mainland. With the influx of business and educational institutes expanding into estate land and islands, Linden Lab is confronted with different types of communities. They have to decide how they can be useful to all communities; so the mainland might become the place for consumer business to occur—more of an entrepreneurial zone for startup businesses and social platforms.

   She feels that maintaining the mainland is important because it needs to be a positive and valuable experience for residents, wherever they choose to be.

3. Voice: Linden Lab is pleased with the implementation of voice. It's been adopted by a variety of SL users and found to be very valuable for businesses, educational venues and even in some social contexts. The Teen Grid is overflowing with voice users. She also took time to explain that using voice is still ultimately a resident's choice.
4. JIRA: Originally thought to be useful because the residents would be able to let LL know what they would like to see addressed, but they've discovered it's a tool that is too difficult to use. Many issues are getting lost and residents feel they are being ignored. LL is looking at another option—to take the feature voting tool (the former way to voice an issue) and open sourcing that code, to see if any residents can fix it and make it web based and available for everyone. Robin opened this up to anyone interested in helping out LL with this project!

Robin ended her discussion with us with her priorities for Linden Lab in 2008. She comments that "…there's so much going on, I think that the biggest challenge at Linden Lab and for the Second Life residents is that we're in a constant state of evolution…we need to make sure we keep the channels of communication open as we go through of these changes…as we grow individual voices are harder to hear…[I think] we'll continue to work together to make Second Life something truly special and unique in technology and in the world…we all want this to be successful."