Chris Collins From Linden Lab: Stability Is The Key
Duncan Riley
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I had the opportunity today to catch up with Chris Collins, the “Technical Assistant to the CEO” at Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life. A Commerce graduate from the University of Western Australia he started in tech, then like many locals (Vibe Capital, Mig33) headed off overseas. After working on his own startup 3 years ago in the Valley he fell in love with Second Life and landed a job as a Business Analyst with Linden Lab. More recently he took up the Technical Assistant to the CEO role, an interesting position in that it’s essentially an executive in training position. Collins shadows Linden Lab CEO Phillip Rosedale at all meetings and functions, and is also directly responsible for Lindex Exchange, the Linden Dollar to US Dollar currency service for Second Life. At the end of the position (6-9mths) he will then take up an executive role with Linden Lab.
The following from my notes of the interview, the answers may be paraphrased at times but the core answers are per my notes. I’d hoped to record it but the initial Skype call was unusable.
DR: There’s been a lot of talk about open source in virtual worlds, with talk of everything from virtual world interoperability, open standards and web based browsing. What’s Linden Lab doing to open up its doors?
CC: Firstly we’ve opened up our client. As a direct result of this we are seeing new and innovative ways of connecting to Second Life. There are already a number of browser based clients in development, and more recently we saw a custom browser built specifically for the CSI:NY program. We’ve also started to provide API’s that hook into Second Life; registration is one area that provides Second Life registration capabilities to other sites, for example Telstra in Australia now provides registration from its Bigpond/ SL page.
DR: What about the Second Life world itself? Obviously the sale of server space is the bread and butter of Linden Lab’s business model; will you consider opening this up as well in future?
CC: Eventually we want to open up everything, every aspect of Second Life, but it’s a massive undertaking and it’s not something we can do overnight.
DR: Talking of servers, there has been rumors that we might start seeing Second Life game servers in other countries, specifically there was a rumor that Telstra in Australia would be hosting them. True or not true?
CC: We currently have around 6000 servers and they are all based in the United States. We are aware of the lag caused by people connecting from a distance, so we are looking at placing servers in other countries.
DR: stability is an ongoing problem for users of Second Life, and lately this seems to have gotten worse. Why? and what’s Linden Lab doing about it
CC: Our biggest focus at the moment is on stability and scalability. We’ve undergone incredible growth over the last 6 months and this has presented a huge challenge for Linden Lab. Stability is the key. Second Life and our backend is entirely unique so there is nothing else like it so it’s not a something that has a simple solution.
DR: We’ve seen companies such as IBM, Cisco and others use Second Life as a virtual meetspace, holding events, virtual recruiting etc.. and yet it’s always struck me as odd that a sim in Second Life can only handle 50-60 people at a time. What’s Linden Lab doing to address this aspect of the Second Life experience?
CC: We’re currently exploring ways of increasing concurrency on a server. This is related to our overall goals of stability and scalability, and like them Second Life in unique so it’s not easy to just provide it.
DR: Second Life has had its fair share of headlines this year for the wrong reasons. Gambling and age play come to mind. You’ve cracked down on gambling, but still there are stories relating age play in the press. What’s Linden Lab doing?
CC: Linden Lab has always had a policy against any activity in Second Life that is illegal. Linden Lab’s has cooperated and is cooperating with authorities in a number of countries.
DR: Someone once said to me that Second Life’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness, and that’s Linden Lab’s libertarian hands-off governance of in-world activity. Only in the last week has there has been yet another attack on Second Life financial institutions with L$3m reportedly stolen from one bank. Griefing is also on the rise, and has been known to interrupt many a meeting. Will Linden Lab step in, and if not, why not?
CC: We don’t encourage this sort of activity and we do have ways to reporting it. We’ve recently improved our community department who is able to deal with complaints of this nature. We are also going to introduce tighter registration requirements
DR: Are you able to elaborate on the registration requirements: credit card, drivers license, something like that?
CC: We have users in over 100 different countries and each country has different forms of identification. We’re still working on the best way of implementing verification that is inclusive of all legitimate signups no matter where they live.
I think that Virtual worlds like Second life are very interesting as in they are dynamic systems with real world interaction. Latest happenings like virtual commodities are intriguing and it wud be fun to see where virtual worlds go.
I never understood the whole Second Life thing. Tried it, walked around, got bored, uninstalled.
Has anyone actually tried going outside? There’s ‘real life’ out there and the graphics are better.
Key to what? Second life? sheesh
@2
Personally, I can’t give up my human interaction for virtual interaction. I am connected enough with my mobile between SMS messages and Netvibes — and would probably never have to be in front of a computer unless I am at work.
Anyone with a first life around still?
Yes, there is real life out there. Go to Wyoming, for example.
Need a second lease on life? Adopt a kid!
Second Life? Couldn’t give a toss!
What Linden Lab need to be concentrating on is overhauling their abysmal presentation technology.
The actual engine powering the whole experience is laughably bad and is in dire need of a drastic rewrite if Second Life hopes to remain prevalent. Otherwise, give it another 18 months an it’ll be a laughing stock.
Thanks for the interview Duncan.
Anyone interested in further thoughts from Chris could check here too:
http://www.sloz.info/2007/02/2.....ew-part-1/
Thanks for that interview! And in fact there have been two things which sound new to me, the team working on increasing concurrency and the registration requirements.
The first would be great of course, the latter I am not so sure. I will just add another barrier to entry and SL has enough of them already (as StartupEarth might have experienced). Of course these are issues which need to be addressed (I just wonder if they are that different from issues arising on the WWW).
And there actually is a project for opening up the Second Life Grid which is open for everybody to participate. The goal is to create an open standard for connecting 3rd party hosted sims to Second Life and also creating your own grid.
This effort is now taking place in the scope of Second Life but of course this protocol might as well be suited to build other stuff on top (and have that compatibility integrated).
Part of that project is also to encourage developers to join it and to create their own (maybe open sourced) components for it. This ensures that the protocol is as interoperable as possible. It also means a lot of opportunity to implement your own ideas on performance, stability or features more easily.
I summarized the latest development recently on my blog:
http://taotakashi.wordpress.co.....an-update/
Second life? Get a life!
Great interview. It’s nice to read that LL remains committed to opening up the whole shebang. It’s also interesting to learn that SL is seriously contemplating launching servers in other countries, which has legal / sovereignty implications in addition to making sense from a load standpoint.
@ Wrestlevania: Gotta wonder if SL has another engine in the works in the BG, one that would help them scale. They’ve got to be re-writing so much code anyway that it would make a lot of sense.
For SL security and popularity is more important than stability in my opinion.
Compared to the current online experiences of both the Xbox 360 and PS3, the gaming experiences of Second Life is sadly stuck back in the early 90’s.
If both Microsoft and Sony every thought of developing an online game that represents a truly engaging mirror earth platform, Second Life will have no Life at all.
Imagine if either Microsoft or Sony created a gaming immersed online platform that visualized the full earth environment with the help and creativity of global gaming developers.
Imagine if everyone who entered this gaming platform was allowed to create their own Avatar to socialize and communicate with anyone they liked inside this platform.
Why would you want to Facebook or Twitter your friends ever again, when you could just all meet up as Avatars and go shopping or walking to places of relevance and interest - and possibly meet new and interesting people.
Plus Global Companies would never have to worry about online Sponsored Ads ever again, as they can build their own online shop fronts inside this earth platform exactly in the same places that their real earth ones stand.
What both Google and Microsoft fail to understand that whilst it is cool to visualize the earth, through their various Earth Platforms, their current representations for both of these platforms is not truly engaging for the important ‘gaming generation’ that were born in the early 80’s.
An online Earth Platform that was totally immersed inside a mirror earth game would not only capture the imagination of every global gamer, but it could also truly mark the dawn of Web 3.0, via this integration of both the gaming and web world’s.
There is a tremendous opportunity for Microsoft to truly do something exciting and innovative across their Xbox 360 online platform. Perhaps their true goal of reaching a target of 30% Ad Revenues over the next few years could be achieved within an online gaming Earth Platform.
Why search on Google when you could discover everything on Microsoft’s possible online gaming earth platform.
Sony is also in a tremendous position to possibly develop an online gaming earth platform. If they could look at ways of using the global gaming community to create an open source online gaming earth platform, they could then use their up and coming Home service for every Users internal online address to really immerse communities inside this space. Home could then become a sort of online ‘Pimp My Crib’.
I think that Second Life has been a truly innovative site that deserves all of the praise and popularity that the web community has given it.
But I truly believe that the most exciting future developments within the Second Life environment, could only be achieved by either Microsoft or Sony entering this arena - and rewriting the rule books.
Is anyone at Microsoft or Sony listening to me.
@Moe
No, they are not. They are WORKING on just that for several years already.
Sony > Home
Microsoft > Earth
But Alex. Home is only placed around small environments and mainly deals with Interior scenes - hence the title.
Whilst Microsoft Virtual Earth mainly offers a Mapping and Photographic representation of Earth, that hardly immerses a gaming environment.
When I think of a gaming environment of our planet, I look at the great views and landscape that is presented in a game such as Spiderman 3.
If this type of landscape could be used as a building block for a full mirror earth online gaming environment, then Second Life would unfortunately have to face the fact that it is now GAME OVER.
Duncan, perhaps with your resources and knowledge, you can tell us whether it is “normal” to have a job title like this. It sounds to me something like “page” or like “apprentice” as in “Medieval social system”. Is this “normal” to have young people shadowing the CEO in order to “become like him” and “assume an executive role”? Isn’t this more like a cult than a company?
These answers are tepid indeed, very stock boilerplate easily findable on the official blog or in the one-liner staples routinely put out at Office Hours.
And here’s a rather misleading statement, “We’ve recently improved our community department who is able to deal with complaints of this nature”.
He says “of this nature,” which is a little sleight of hand that covers up the fact that complaints *exactly of this type* in fact are NOT dealt with. Bank fraud is NOT dealt with by LL, they resolutely keep hands off, they refuse to get in the middle of any resident-to-resident transaction of this nature, and they will not regulate banks. They will not accept for action any complaints of the type “I invested thousands of Lindens in this stock market or deposited in this bank and now the people have flown the coop.”
The will handle more straight-forward theft involving scripted objects that dupe people into agreeing to give their money to them or hacked accounts, in these more rare cases they apparently do return Lindens, but these big bank heist and Ponzi scheme allegations are things they stay away from. And maybe that’s a good thing. This is debatable.
The company mantra in the last half year has been that Linden Lab would open-source the server code “within a year”. Now that this date is looming to be some six months away, I guess the mantra has changed to saying “as soon as possible” and “because it’s complex”
Funny, all those comments about “get a life” coming from people sitting in front of a PC and adding anonymous comments to web logs. 2007: “Second Life, get a life!” 1997: “Internet? Get a life.”