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Tensile Structure

Well, 2005 was pretty good overall, but who cares, right?  I always thought that it was more fun to look to the future than to wallow in the past.  I've been on vacation for the last 2 weeks, and have a few more days before I get back to work, but there is nothing like taking long, cold walks on a north pacific beach looking for the tell tale signs of razor clams (blood stains) to get a young man thinking about his company's future. 

Don't worry, I'm not the only one thinking about this stuff – there was a fair amount of discussion going on in the office before I left about what Linden Lab should be doing in 2006.  The discussions seem to be revolving around the idea that we might “tip” in the coming year.  Tipping refers to the explosive change rates that some social phenomena exhibit suddenly and mysteriously.  Think SL going from 100k to 1 million residents in a month or two.

Now, obviously, 1 million customers would be awesome in terms of pure business numbers.  I wouldn't  mind being able to retire at 26 (although I suspect it might be a bit boring).  However, I would guess that anyone who reads my scribblings knows that we are not quite ready for that.  We are keenly aware that there are a few places where we are short.  First of all, our servers would collapse under that load.  Secondly, the product it's self needs more work to be mainstream enough to “tip” - we need to make a more polished, easier to use Second Life, and in case competition shows up (which we think is very likely this year) we need to continue to innovate in our feature set. 

Now, we have limited resources.  Not as limited as we did at the start of 2005, but we learned with 1.7 what happens when we try to do everything at once – not enough.  This creates a tension between Scaling, Polish, and Innovation.  We can either divert all our resources and do a lot of one, or try and balance them out and do some each of them.

If we work on a single goal, it will be scaling.  This is by far the most critical – as long as we keep the servers up and running, we should be able to stay flat on user acquisition – we can re-architect the system to the point where we can scale to our target number, and then start working on polish and features again.  We probably won't “tip” this way – but we can guarantee a tip won't burn the grid into the modular flooring of the colo. 

Unfortunately, while scaling is critical, it is also boring. I know that some residents are getting a little disenchanted with what they feel is a slowing rate of feature addition.  The early adopter dream of the metaverse is the platform, the open, infinite feature set world where everyone has their own completely customizable domain.   Linden Lab has talked up this goal now for a few years, but lately, it has been hard for the end-user to see any progress made in this respect.  The early adopters and long time creators get bored, and use SL less.  Losing our hardcore residents won't help us tip.

Similarly, new users are often discouraged when first using Second Life with what is sometimes called the “learning cliff' (learn to fly before you hit the bottom?).  There is a lot that can be done that will help new users – I've touched on buying new land before, but our UI is still pretty dense and scary.  There are some features that 90% of the people in Linden Lab don't know how to use, and yet we want people to have a good experience inside of 1 hour.  Then we go adding MORE features, and trying to squeeze the UI widgets wherever they will fit.  We will never tip if we can't do a better job of getting new users hooked faster.

I think we need to do all of it.  But we need to maintain the proper tension between them all.  Scaling is going to be our top priority, but we can not ignore innovation and polish if we want to tip. Finding the right balance will be one of the most difficult challenges we face in the next 12 months.  I think the content team will be able to help with this a lot, so I'm really looking forward to this next year, it will be an exciting one!

Da Boom?

So I was going to have a whole post about the infohub here today - but the message board isn't quite working yet, and they are only placeholders until the resident created ones are thrown in.  Nonetheless, I hope that some are able to enjoy the space without the baggage of all the drama that was created around it.

 

"Tommy Lee Jones," the black man said.

I dunno, I don't see the resemblance...

(The pic got squished, it's Ted Kaczynski)

Just 'cause I bombed the welcome area that one time.

(Pic links to the website)

A Wizard's Visit

I had the pleasure of sitting in on a meeting and lunch with Pavel Curtis today.  For those who don't know, he was the guy behind LambdaMOO - one of Second Life's granddaddies.  It let it's users create, change, script, and live in a virtual world - basically text based SL.  He came by to talk to us about his experience building in Second Life.

I don't think that just any creator in Second Life could come by the office and fill a conference room with out senior programmers to listen to him or her, as much as it might be good for us.  Pavel has been working with the same problems that we are working with for 15 years - and doing a good job, it lends a certain weight to his criticism. 

I got in to his presentation a little late, but in time to hear his trials and tribulations using the scripting feature.  Ahh, I winced in sympathy as he spoke, I know your pain Mr Curtis.  The funny thing was, I've gotten so used to it, it's hard to notice.  This is always a challenge for us.  Almost everyone in the office - certainly the senior developers, are so accomplished at using Second Life, we forget how broken some parts are.  Ask me to find some land, and buy it, and I can do it in about 30 seconds... with my toes...with one leg tied behind my chair....blindfolded.  Ask a new user... and if that user is an accomplished interface designer, we will get an email back with 38 places where we were wrong (really, that is not an exaggeration this time).

Pavel had a lot of ideas on what was wrong with things like scripting - nothing we don't know in some way, but good to hear.  At the same time, he kept repeating that he was having a great time in Second Life, despite the limitations.  I guess that means we've got some of it right.  He also had some ideas on how to make things better, many of which were targeted towards novices.  He believed that almost any change we could make that would make it easier for people to pick up scripting would well be worth it, and as someone who has written his own programming languages, he had some ideas.  About this time, I had no idea what was going on anymore, but it sounded very exciting.

Lunch was good too, I had Gnocchi Neopolitina (I think).

I bling. She blang. We blung.

Saturday night, Linden Lab had it's holiday party.  I had to buy a new outfit - as a stereotypical californian software making person, I tend not to care much when it comes to looking good.  My avatar has style, I don't. 

I suppose having style was kind of secondary to the evening's theme: "Bling in the Holidays."  As fashion unconcious as I am, even I know that Bling is Dead.  I wonder if it has anything to do with the room full of monitzed platform thingy developers paying tribute to gangsta rap.

I didn't really want to bling.  While kinda funny, at it's heart it seems to me that we were kind of making fun of our user base - something I don't like to do... Ok, I do like to make fun of you guys - but more on a personal basis - I'd say the same things to your face.

I can't criticize too much - I had the opportunity to help organize the party if I had wanted to, and I have to give props to Ramzi, Wendy, Brent, Cyn, Kona, Wilder, et al for working so hard to put together was a very enjoyable evening.   There was a bowl of bling out for the blingless, and my explanation that I was the embodiment of bling, and would outshiney anything they tried to drape on me - didn't fly.

The highlight of the evening, at least for me, was when Bill Gurley walked in with a big shiney gold "$" on his necklace.  Hawt.  Second Best was Bub's disco ball testicles.

(apologies for pic quality, cameraphone in dark club)

Mo Money, Mo Problems?

Prokofy Neva asks

You said LL is a company that is "not yet profitable." Oh? Are you saying you burned through the ebay guy's money on a lot of new servers and it isn't paying off yet...and that explains why all these sudden shocks and changes...1.7 with its wierd forced-45 FPS...this sudden shocking move to p2p and getting rid of telehubs? Is that really what explains it all?

Fast answer:

No, I’m not saying that, and no, that doesn’t explain it. 

Slow answer: 

We are still spending more money than we are making, but we are not in any kind of trouble. We still have a comfortable amount of money in the bank, and we are making enough money that we are not spending it too fast.

Buying a lot of servers is actually pretty low risk. If you check out hardware prices, you can see that we essentially pay the cost of the sim hardware as soon as we auction them off, and we have no problem auctioning them off. Some servers, like the asset server, cost more and do not bring in revenue directly – but they are costs we can eat.

The primary reason we are not profitable is because we keep hiring, but we keep hiring because we are making enough money that we are not increasing our burn rate. We need to scale our manpower along with Second Life – there is a lot of stuff that needs doing, and the userbase is not all early adopters who are as forgiving with bugs and incomplete implementations.

Since we are not hurting for money, what explains the “sudden shocks and changes?”

The forced-45 FPS is a sim performance fix. In 1.6, we realized that we had no limit on how many sim resources scripts could take up. When the script engine was designed, we did put limits on individual script performance so that it would be difficult to crush a sim with a single script, but we didn’t know that people would be using a thousand scripts on a single sim.  Many “laggy” sims were a result of to many scripts running, and taking resources that could have been allocated to Avatars, Physics, etc.

In order to increase overall sim performance, we implemented what we call a script scheduler. When the sim’s resources become scarce – say a big party with lots of avatars, instead of letting all those scripts taking too many resources, we slow them all down. I don’t know the details of the implementation, but the 45 FPS clamp is to facilitate that. In 1.6 (before the limit) 10 percent of the time, sims were at less than 35 FPS – about where performance starts to degrade noticeably. Since the change, they are under 35 FPS about 3% of the time. We still need to make that better – but it is in the right direction.

The move to p2p (was it really that shocking?) happened because of a concentration of attention to the new user experience (which happened mostly because of the new people we hired, thus not becoming profitable). Second Life (as an application) isn’t very friendly to a new user – we’ve known this for a long time – and we have been making incremental progress on it, but mostly we had been concentrating on the Orientation Island and the Welcome area – the places where we have full control. User tests (where we sit behind some poor sap as they use SL for the first time) showed that these worked ok, but when we extended the test a bit – we realized how hard it is for a new user to take the next step and go somewhere.

A typical scenario: I want to go play a game. I open up find and type “games.” I see a lot of casinos – that’s cool though, I like playing gambling games, and they all say free money, and I don’t have much. So I click the teleport button. My expected behavior is that I will go straight there, but I don’t – I’m standing in somewhere completely different than where I thought I was going. I notice an arrow on my screen, and the red beacon. I’m smart enough to realize that I can go that way, so I hit fly and head in that direction. In the meantime, everything is loading around me. Suddenly I stop! What’s going on? Lag? Did I hit the wrong button? I try to fly forward again – this time I notice the collision particles, I must be hitting something! Suddenly a room loads around me – how did I get in here? I can’t see the beacon anymore. How did I get in here?

“At this point I would stop playing.” 

Ouch. How do we fix this? Well, the easiest, cheapest way is to turn on p2p – after all, it is already in the system for gods, with a few changes, we can do it really soon.

To tell the truth, I think there is a bigger problem earlier in the process – “How do I find something that interests me.”  I don’t think p2p should be all that high priority – but all of my objections are that of a game designer – “It will make the world feel smaller.” That is a whole other post though.

So, in conclusion, we have the monies, and while the changes relate to improving user experience, which means more paying users, they are not directly made to save us from some financial bugaboo.

The really slow answer: