Recently, I posted an update here on our blogs about on Linden Lab’s strategy. I mentioned my desire to hold an inworld meeting for questions before the end of July, and today I’m happy to share some details on how you can participate!

On Friday July 30th, join myself and COO Bob Komin (BK Linden) at 10am SLT/PST at Linden Estate Services for an Inworld meeting with the Residents of Second Life. It was announced this June that I would be returning as interim CEO and I’d like to take this opportunity to address some of the excitement, concerns and questions that have been circulating for the past few weeks. The overall goal is to open up the conversation with the community about our upcoming plans around the development and future of Second Life.

If you would like to attend, please fill out this form with your Second Life name and email address no later than 5pm SLT/PST on Wednesday, July 28th.  Admission to the live event will be decided by a random draw and the winners will be notified on the 29th by either an email or notecard with instructions on how to RSVP. Please keep in mind that the event will be in English and that both myself and Bob will be using SL Voice.

We are attempting to make this event as inclusive as possible so that those who are interested will be able to participate. We have partnered with TreetTV in order to provide live video and audio streaming of the event. In addition, we have asked Virtual Ability Island to provide a transcription of the event so that those with hearing impairments can follow along. You can also submit questions throughout the event to the SL Twitter account. The final 20-30 minutes of the event will be devoted to answering some of those questions.

I’m looking forward to hearing from the community on Friday, and keeping in touch with you as we move forward.

Thanks,

Philip

Hi Everyone,

It’s been just over 3 weeks now since my return as  CEO, and I think I’ve gotten up to speed enough to begin communicating  with you in a useful way.   This post is an update on what we are doing,  and also to announce an in-world meeting where I’ll extend on the  thoughts in this post, as well as answer as many question as possible.    Beyond the contents of this message and meeting, I hope to revitalize a  frank and timely exchange between the company and the Second Life  community.  You can expect additional posts from us in the coming weeks  expanding these focus areas to more specific projects.  This is a time  of great change for us:  a downsizing and restructuring of the company, a  change in executive leadership, and big changes to our strategic  planning and directions.

When I spoke at the seventh-birthday celebration, I said how we  needed to ‘tear down the walls’ that broadly keep more people from  getting into and using Second Life.  We have created together (both  Linden Lab and the many of you who create content and experiences) an  amazing shared experience which at it’s best is a breathtaking social,  creative, educational, and entrepreneurial platform.  But we’ve gotten  ahead of ourselves.  We still have a lot of hard work to do to make this  experience accessible to a majority of people.  At a very high level,  we’re slowing down work that we think we’ve started too early or in the  wrong order, and refocusing our team and projects on improving the basic  features which impact all users and which are essential to the  operation of Second Life.  Additionally we will focus on faster  iteration with more input from the community, as well as greatly growing  the virtual marketplace.

Here are some more details on the current state of that planning  process:

Inside the Lab, we’ve been using the expression ‘back to  basics’, to capture refocusing our efforts to re-examine, repair, and  where necessary, re-design the basic experiences and systems that are at  the core of the Second Life experience.   First on the list should be a  big attack on lag and crashes, clearly things that very negatively  impact all users.  We are looking at ‘lag’ broadly to encompass things  like chat failures and delays, frame rates, and scene and object loading  delays.  Beyond performance and crashes, wherever possible we will make  the basic user experiences (like getting clothes on, communicating, or  your first few sessions as a new user) faster, easier, and more fun.

Next,  we’ve been looking at how we need to more rapidly improve and innovate  Second Life to re-capture and sustain the technology leadership position  that got us to where we are today, and is vital to scaling the virtual  world experience to maturity.  In creating Second Life, we’ve solved  some very hard problems across a number of different areas, and few  people have been able to copy us.  We need to get back to being the  first to invent and deliver the solutions that evolve virtual worlds -  we are still at the very beginning of a huge market.  That’s a lot of  different work, but in the short term you can expect to see greatly  shortened release cycles across all our systems and a focus on rapid  iteration with lots of community feedback as a first result of those  efforts.   The other key short term goal is to very rapidly make Viewer  2.x the best and most widely-used Second Life viewer.  We are unifying  efforts across the lab to make this viewer both the best-performing and  the most functionally capable for all different users, as well as  hopefully becoming the underlying codebase for lots of  third party  development.

We’ve also identified the virtual content (both goods and  services) marketplace as a key longer-term area of focus as well as the  key metric for our collective success.  There are 10′s of thousands of  entrepreneurs, creators, and merchants working together inside Second  Life that have already created what is easily the world’s largest market  for virtual items and experiences, with around 0M expected in total  volume in 2010.   We’re going to redirect efforts to improve and grow  that market as quickly as possible.  Making content and experience  creators more successful is what ultimately drives the growth of Second  Life.   Optimizing from end-to-end the process of searching for, trying,  buying, and using virtual goods will be our first focus here.

We will make every effort to deliver visible and continuous  improvements in these three areas over the remainder of the year.  The  shift to shorter cycles with smaller deliverables  should allow better  community involvement and feedback.  We will make our changes, develop  code, and discuss plans in the open.  Before the end of July, we will  also hold an in-world gathering where we can  talk more about these  plans and take questions. More details about how  we can best  get a big group together and talking will be coming in  another post.

As a final note, I would note that we are not planning to change  Second Life to exclude any categories of users.  Our restructuring  messaging around ‘consumers’ and ‘web’ versions of Second Life seemed to  mistakenly suggest to some that we plan to more narrowly focus the  experience on a specific demographic or use model.  We aren’t.  We are  reducing efforts across the board that in our opinion are being done in  the wrong order, but those resources will re-focus on creating a single  effective system that is better for all categories of user.  We believe  we first need to improve and complete the core experiences that drive  Second Life, before we dive into how to customize it for different  markets.

In closing, I’d like to thank the SL community,  and in particular  those people who sent me the many heart-warming email messages of  support that I’ve received since returning.  They have been both a  direct contribution to these plans, and also a way to keep a smile on my  face in these tough but exciting times.  If you have thoughts about  Second Life that you want to share with me, please keep those emails  coming.  I can’t say that I can read or respond to everything, but I  have gotten great value from many of the well-written thoughts I’ve  received.

Hi Everyone,

It’s been just over 3 weeks now since my return as  CEO, and I think I’ve gotten up to speed enough to begin communicating  with you in a useful way.   This post is an update on what we are doing,  and also to announce an in-world meeting where I’ll extend on the  thoughts in this post, as well as answer as many question as possible.    Beyond the contents of this message and meeting, I hope to revitalize a  frank and timely exchange between the company and the Second Life  community.  You can expect additional posts from us in the coming weeks  expanding these focus areas to more specific projects.  This is a time  of great change for us:  a downsizing and restructuring of the company, a  change in executive leadership, and big changes to our strategic  planning and directions.

When I spoke at the seventh-birthday celebration, I said how we  needed to ‘tear down the walls’ that broadly keep more people from  getting into and using Second Life.  We have created together (both  Linden Lab and the many of you who create content and experiences) an  amazing shared experience which at it’s best is a breathtaking social,  creative, educational, and entrepreneurial platform.  But we’ve gotten  ahead of ourselves.  We still have a lot of hard work to do to make this  experience accessible to a majority of people.  At a very high level,  we’re slowing down work that we think we’ve started too early or in the  wrong order, and refocusing our team and projects on improving the basic  features which impact all users and which are essential to the  operation of Second Life.  Additionally we will focus on faster  iteration with more input from the community, as well as greatly growing  the virtual marketplace.

Here are some more details on the current state of that planning  process:

Inside the Lab, we’ve been using the expression ‘back to  basics’, to capture refocusing our efforts to re-examine, repair, and  where necessary, re-design the basic experiences and systems that are at  the core of the Second Life experience.   First on the list should be a  big attack on lag and crashes, clearly things that very negatively  impact all users.  We are looking at ‘lag’ broadly to encompass things  like chat failures and delays, frame rates, and scene and object loading  delays.  Beyond performance and crashes, wherever possible we will make  the basic user experiences (like getting clothes on, communicating, or  your first few sessions as a new user) faster, easier, and more fun.

Next,  we’ve been looking at how we need to more rapidly improve and innovate  Second Life to re-capture and sustain the technology leadership position  that got us to where we are today, and is vital to scaling the virtual  world experience to maturity.  In creating Second Life, we’ve solved  some very hard problems across a number of different areas, and few  people have been able to copy us.  We need to get back to being the  first to invent and deliver the solutions that evolve virtual worlds -  we are still at the very beginning of a huge market.  That’s a lot of  different work, but in the short term you can expect to see greatly  shortened release cycles across all our systems and a focus on rapid  iteration with lots of community feedback as a first result of those  efforts.   The other key short term goal is to very rapidly make Viewer  2.x the best and most widely-used Second Life viewer.  We are unifying  efforts across the lab to make this viewer both the best-performing and  the most functionally capable for all different users, as well as  hopefully becoming the underlying codebase for lots of  third party  development.

We’ve also identified the virtual content (both goods and  services) marketplace as a key longer-term area of focus as well as the  key metric for our collective success.  There are 10′s of thousands of  entrepreneurs, creators, and merchants working together inside Second  Life that have already created what is easily the world’s largest market  for virtual items and experiences, with around 0M expected in total  volume in 2010.   We’re going to redirect efforts to improve and grow  that market as quickly as possible.  Making content and experience  creators more successful is what ultimately drives the growth of Second  Life.   Optimizing from end-to-end the process of searching for, trying,  buying, and using virtual goods will be our first focus here.

We will make every effort to deliver visible and continuous  improvements in these three areas over the remainder of the year.  The  shift to shorter cycles with smaller deliverables  should allow better  community involvement and feedback.  We will make our changes, develop  code, and discuss plans in the open.  Before the end of July, we will  also hold an in-world gathering where we can  talk more about these  plans and take questions. More details about how  we can best  get a big group together and talking will be coming in  another post.

As a final note, I would note that we are not planning to change  Second Life to exclude any categories of users.  Our restructuring  messaging around ‘consumers’ and ‘web’ versions of Second Life seemed to  mistakenly suggest to some that we plan to more narrowly focus the  experience on a specific demographic or use model.  We aren’t.  We are  reducing efforts across the board that in our opinion are being done in  the wrong order, but those resources will re-focus on creating a single  effective system that is better for all categories of user.  We believe  we first need to improve and complete the core experiences that drive  Second Life, before we dive into how to customize it for different  markets.

In closing, I’d like to thank the SL community,  and in particular  those people who sent me the many heart-warming email messages of  support that I’ve received since returning.  They have been both a  direct contribution to these plans, and also a way to keep a smile on my  face in these tough but exciting times.  If you have thoughts about  Second Life that you want to share with me, please keep those emails  coming.  I can’t say that I can read or respond to everything, but I  have gotten great value from many of the well-written thoughts I’ve  received.