secondlife: interview with Philip Rosedale

Posted on | July 8, 2006 | No Comments

Secondcast, a weekly podcast focused on Seond Life, published their second audio-interview with Philip Rosedale (aka Philip Linden), CEO and founder of Linden Labs (the april-interview can be found here and here).

philip obviously comments on the currently heavy-discussed changes in user-registration (since about a month, signing up with Second Life doesn’t require a creditcard anymore). many “oldschool” inhabitants criticize the new, lax policy for opening doors to fake accounts and what they call “griefers” – meaning users attacking others (verbally or through scripts) or even bringing down whole regions by exploiting bugs in Second Life. Philips valid argument for the new policy is of course “openness” – Linden Labs ultimately plans to position their platform as a next-generation WWW, restricting access by requiring a creditcard therefor had to stop at some point in time (though Linden maybe should have waited until the system is more resistant against all kinds of user-attacks). personally I haven’t had many bad experiences during the past weeks (and since I just finished my article on Second Life for thegap, I was online quite a lot). what I like even more: the new policy led to a massive shift in user-demographics. while a few months ago 3 out of 4 users were living in the US, it’s only 50% now.

of course there is another motivation for Linden Labs in lowering the barriere-of-entry for new users: currently about 314.000 internet-users in the world have started their “Second Lifes”. compared with about 6.5mio users playing World-of-Warcraft, that’s not a lot. agreed, comparing the game WoW with the platform “Second Life” isn’t appropriate, still, both are labeled ‘MMOG’ and perceived as competitors. btw if you’re interested in the usage-numbers of various MMOGs, I highly recommend MMOGChart

the interview – as past ones – gives insight into how Linden Labs is operated and what Philip’s vision of Second Life’s future might look like. looks like Second Life is here to stay…

 

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