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Too many metaphors for a good title

Knock Knock.

Who's there?

The Amazing Benlinden-man!

(This is a post that I have been thinking about for months, it's a bit introspective though, so if you don't care about me, and just want to see thoughts about LL and SL and, skip below the break, but don't expect me to call up and sing you happy birthday next week.)

I should have read more superhero comics as a kid.  Those things were chock full of advice on how to manage dual identities.  Unfortunately, at that age I was encouraged to read books without pictures (and play games outside instead of on a Nintendo as a matter of fact), and never had the chance to learn the lessons presented by the various brightly uniformed heroes and heroines.

Now that I am old and wise, and get to choose my own reading material, I am drawn by the gravity-like force of my own geekyness to the comic book store.   I am not a collector, and I can't stand having to start reading a story from the middle, so I tend towards the graphic novels and collections.  My misspent youth gives me very little in the way of navigating what is good, but luckily, I have plenty of friends who can point me in the right direction. 

I tend to shy away from the standard superhero story – they have their merits, but I distrust a universe so cleanly cut into good and evil.  I like the darker stuff that started seeping into comics in the  80's – where the reader is confronted with the possibility that the hero isn't so good, and the bad guy might not be so bad.  Comics where the line between freedom fighter and terrorist is blurred.  Stories where heroes become human, and normal humans might get to be heroes.

I have a confession to make.  I have a mild mannered alter ego.  Except he might not be so mild mannered. That's kinda the problem.  I' don't want to tell you who he is – some of you might know, or think you know – I'd like to keep the alternate in my ego.

Why do I have an alt?  Well, originally, Ben was the alt.   I was immersed in the community before I was ever offered a job at Linden Lab, and it was a time in my life when the escapist nature of the virtual world was very attractive.  I made friends, and I created a space in this world that was a kind of home.  When I was offered the liaison position, no one knew exactly what it entailed.  At that point, the $L was worthless, but the world was so small, it was easy to be famous.  I requested that my alt name become my linden name, ala Torley, or at least “Benjamin” which I enjoy more than “Ben.”  That didn't happen though (and at the time, I was so awestruck by the company I would be working for, I didn't argue.)

Inadvertently, I now had a second identity (third, if you count the real world, but that is soooo 4 years ago).  At first, I was free with revealing who I was, after all, I was even more famous than before!  Soon enough, I found that it meant that the second life I had cultivated to that point was suffering – I couldn't just log in to pursue my own projects, or just socialize – I was always working.  I don't think it was a conscious decision to stop telling people who I was at first – I just  wanted to keep my freedom to “play.”   

This created a few tensions.  First, some people knew who my alt was, but I didn't want them to pass on the knowledge.  Second, there were some people who I formed friendships with who I did want to know.  These tensions exist to this day, and occasionally it flares up –  if I “out” myself to someone, it means that I have decided to trust them, and if I am outed by someone else, I feel my trust is betrayed.  There are a few solutions to this.  First, I can remove an identity.  I can end my alt, or I suppose, end my linden.  I don't want to do that – I have invested too much in both identities.

The second one is transparency – I can tell you who I am, and make it public.  This is something I have wrestled with for a few years now.  Even as I write this, I flip back and forth between thinking it would be a good idea to tell everyone and thinking it would be a bad idea to tell everyone.  The benefit, of course, is that it relieves those tensions, the cost is that it makes my it harder to lead a normal second life.  Of course, this is only my personal level – Ben Linden is a public figure, and as such, I need to consider the costs and benefits to both my Company, and my Customers. 

For your reading pleasure..

I need to apologize for the lack of recent posts - a new project is eating up my free time..

Here is your homework for the weekend: read Thomas Malaby's paper about the different forms of capital in virtual worlds.  Professer Malaby has been studying us for the last year or so, and by us, I mean he was sitting about 10 feet away doing ethnographic research on Linden Lab last week.  He was sitting at a desk with a laptop, which may be a kind of dot-com version of a duck blind, but it seems that ethnographers try to immerse themselves in the culture they are studying.

I never got around to taking a anthropology class in college - my only experience with the social sciences finding a orange warning cone on a footbridge one morning, only to look up and notice a gaggle of students with clipboards trying to hide behind a bush.  I waved at them, and walked across the bridge.  For whatever reason, I tend to respect researchers who don't try to hide behind shrubbery.

I had a whole long post planned out on how being researched makes me a bit introspective - in this case, my relationship to Linden Lab's culture, and how it affects my relationship with "the world."  Unfortunately, it was long and rambling, so my internal editor chopped it all out and promised to include it in a future post.

Oh well, enjoy Prof. Malaby's work!

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!

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)