Philip Rosedale on the Second Life Viewer: A Tough Nut to Crack, but Good Enough for Grandma
Perhaps no aspect of Second Life® is more contentious than the state of the “viewer,” the software we download on our own machines and governs interact with Second Life. And perhaps no one outside Linden Lab® and its competitors has thought about the viewer more than Dusan Writer. So here are Philip’s thoughts on the viewer; you can see Dusan’s analysis at his wonderful virtual worlds blog, Dusan Writer's Metaverse.
A Tough Nut to Crack
PHILIP ROSEDALE: [A] couple of years ago everybody was sort of saying, “Well, Second Life, the interface just needs to be made better, and it’s very easy to make the interface better and, well, those Second Life guys are a bit more infrastructure than they are UI and people are going to come out and then really innovate on this UI.” Well, you look at the UIs today, they’re not significantly better. It’s a very hard problem. You can look at any generalized virtual environment product, and it’s got the same challenges in usability that Second Life has. Everybody’s got the same problems. So it’s a hard problem, but once you get over the hump, once you actually figure out how to use a virtual world, I believe that the ease with which you can do new and different things in the world that are of utility to you is much better than the web.
But Good Enough for Grandma
I often ask the stock question, which is: If you had a grandparent or parent that was intelligent and interested in engaging with a new community, getting an extra job, finding something interesting to do in their older years, and they really weren’t that familiar with the internet at all, would you sort of teach them how to use Second Life, or would you teach them how to more generally just use the web? And I think the answer, interestingly if you think about it, is you’d actually be better off showing them how to use Second Life. Because even though the learning curve at the beginning would be brutal, you’d have to literally sit with them for that five or six hours of getting online, creating an avatar, getting dressed, finding some friends, finding something initially to do.
Once you got them to that point, then subsequent to that, everything’s relatively easy. How do you get a job in Second Life? Ask someone. You’ll find your way. How do you get a job on the web? Very hard problem. What do you do, you go to Google and type “get a job”? That’s going to be harder. You’re not going to find your way to LinkedIn or Monster.com or Craig’s List. I mean it’s hard. So I think that it’s very likely that the general application of virtual worlds will cover use cases so substantial and so diffuse that we’re ultimately going to see here a situation where Second Life and, more generally, virtual worlds and however we connect all these companies together spanning an amount of use that is greater than the web today.
I have some sympathy for this basic point, but I would suggest Philip refine this in a couple of ways. First, I think people who are familiar with the Second Life economy will not say it is the easiest way to get a paying job. But there is an incredibly active community of volunteers who are finding ways to better the real world, not just the virtual world. So emphasizing grandma’s ability to be a volunteer is probably going to be far more convincing than emphasizing her ability to get a job.
Perhaps more importantly, I would suggest that Philip emphasize community and friendship even more than he does. Sure, he mentions it first, but if this is going to be one of Philip’s stock questions, and a sales pitch for virtual worlds, I think community needs to be the only item on the list. A website is not a village; a virtual world can be. Someone who is your friend only on Facebook is not much of a friend; someone who is your friend only in Second Life really can be.
I move on in the interview to talk about some specific competitors: namely, Lively and Multiverse.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: So if we look at the specific worlds that are coming out, thinking about the notion of different tools for different purposes, so I just wanted to talk about some that are quite different. One is Lively, which has just come out. One of the things people have said about that is: Much easier to get into immediately, easier onboarding process, minimal download.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: Well, the Lively client is about the same size as the Second Life client. There’s a nice step there where there’s a little downloader (and I think that’s something we should probably do as well) that downloads the actual client in the background. But if you actually watch that process, it’s about the same size. You’re on broadband so you probably don’t notice, but you’re actually downloading about the same amount of software. It’s a comparably sized client.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Yeah. So just say it’s a presentation issue.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: There’s a very small download initially that’s about a half megabyte, but then there’s a tens of megabytes download that happens immediately thereafter.
ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Some people say, “Oh, well, Lively’s so much easier to use. It’s going to blow Second Life out of the water.” The other thing I’ve heard people say is, “This is like an entryway. People are going to go into Lively. It’s going to get them more comfortable with virtual worlds, and then they’re going to look for the richer content and capabilities of Second Life.” Would you agree with either of those?
PHILIP ROSEDALE: I think every experiment, like a Lively, every new product that tries to do anything in this category is going to teach us all something. I mean I think there are going to be UI innovations that will be discovered by Lively having taken a different development path, done this all with a different set of intentions that we’re all going to benefit from. Paradigms for navigation or whatever. I’ve seen rich discussion around how you walk around in Lively versus how you walk around in Second Life.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: I don’t believe that Lively or any other virtual world product is onboarding people particularly faster than Second Life. In some sense, I wish it were true because I think it would again give us all more grist for the mill. But I think when you examine the actual statistics of use you’ll see that there’s still a daunting challenge in getting people into these worlds.
The following segment of the interview actually came from a discussion on Philip’s strategy of making many “small bets” in development, rather than big ones that could be disastrous failures. When I asked him what bets had had made that didn’t work, he gave examples from the viewer. So I figured I would include them here as well.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: I think back on some of my own goofiest feature ideas. Well, I think, for example, this problem of improving the orientation experience; we’ve had a lot of blind alleys on that. There have been a lot of experiments where we’ve tried to improve the new user experience, and we’ve just backed out of it. We had a more sophisticated orientation island that we’ve taken mostly or completely out of circulation now. We put a bunch of time into developing the content experience in the HUD and the different elements of that sort of new user island experience. In retrospect, with the statistics at hand, it doesn’t seem to have helped people very much get started in Second Life. So we just backed out of that because it simplifies the experience a bit to not have that system there.
So I think of trying to improve the conversion behavior, the usability, the UI. We went back to allowing people to use the old UI as the default, with the Dazzle UI (as an option?), although in that case we didn’t lose work because all the foundational work and the option of using that new scheme is there, so we didn’t actually back up and lose anything. That’s a case where we just try different experiments, and some things resolve and are harder hitting than others. What else? There have been lots of smaller features. I remember there was a feature called ‘Talk To’ that was kind of a substitute for Instant Messaging. It was actually my design. I loved it. It just didn’t work. We actually took it out; it was so unused that we ultimately just shut it off so there would be less ‘stuff’ in the UI.
PHILIP ROSEDALE: I think that if you look at something like Multiverse – Mycosm I’m not as familiar with yet – those are environments that have taken on the broader problem of arbitrary content creation. I mean I think there are all kinds of nuanced questions about which particular feature choices, or which use cases, or which types of content capabilities are likely to grow fastest and satisfy people most, you know, create the most interest. But our approach to that, as you know, has been to believe that there are likely to be very uniform, globally open standards for moving this content around.
Click here to see Dusan Writer's take on Philip's comments.
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