SL5B/Transcripts

Opening Keynote - 2008-06-23

Philip Linden

Well, hello everyone. This is Philip Linden, aka Philip Rosedale, or the other way around, you choose. I guess as time goes by, I will shift between real and Second Life names. Delightful to have everyone here. Sorry about the initial technical setup delays there. We are using streaming audio for this event, so it has been work, as always, to set up a stream that, hopefully, works. The advantage of using streaming audio is, hopefully, and I stress "hopefully", there are many more of you listening than are standing in front of me right now. We are in the Second Life birthday sim right now. I am here with, oh it looks like about 110 people or so standing and sitting in front of me. We started this strange event with a "bench tipping" — someone tipped over a bench with a bunch of avatars on it and it was delightful and I have no idea what else the day will have in store given that as its beginning.

I am joined here to my left, I think, by the magical M Linden who is going to talk in a few minutes. I am going to talk first. We are, also, glad to see everybody here. You know, this, of course, is Second Life's 5th birthday. I cannot tell you how surreal that is for me. I feel like I have lived a lifetime in Second Life; five years, it seems like fifty years or something, but it is incredibly rewarding to have, as I have said it years before, to just see everyone here, see a lot of the same people I have seen over the years and the, also, of course, lots and lots new people and, so, I just wanted to say a few words about that, let M talk a little bit, and then, you know what I think we will do after we are done talking is, we are all sitting in a little sound booth right now so that we can do this streaming audio thing, so, by the way, if you are talking in voice to us inworld or, even if you are texting and IMing, we are not really responding because we are sort of talking into the microphone right now. In a few minutes, when we both get done, I am going to actually logout and then come back and hang around a little bit and walk around and talk to people in text and look at some of the content that is here in these sims around us.

So, getting to that, we are surrounded by this birthday celebration that has all kinds of content built by people all over Second Life and it is amazing to note that there are, I think, twenty sims that make up the area here that we are standing in the middle of and those twenty sims are larger than Second Life was, they are larger than the entire world of Second Life, at the time it first went online, that was on June 23, 2003, and, I believe, we had sixteen sims online and we had a world that looked like a little key. For those who remember, it was kind of nine sims and then a little peninsula and then another four sims at the end of the peninsula and we had areas that were kind of centrally constructed. That, of course, rapidly went away as people kind of took the world over.

We had a sort of a fighting area and then we had a kind of a boardwalk and a disco and I do not know who remembers all of these things, but there were these structured pieces of Second Life that had been the Lindens' best guess at what people would care to sort of start with in the virtual world. I remember that within just a couple of months, the content build-out was so radical, the amount of things that people had done to change the world so accelerating, that we found ourselves sort of giving the keys to our cherished builds that we had started with over to Residents so that they could tear them down and do things with them.

I have a great memory of this myself that is, perhaps, apropos to an event like this which was I built the first disco, the Alt-Zoom Disco in Second Life, and I actually built it with my own hands and it was a few months after we started that someone, I do not remember who the leader sort of Resident was, but they demanded that I sell the disco to them because they wanted to tear it down and build houses there. And, so, we did that; I gave the disco to whomever it was, maybe somebody can shout out and tell me who it was, I have forgotten, and they had this ceremony where they blew up the disco and tore the walls down and let the whole thing collapse and then deleted it all and I remember I viewed that with a certain feeling of bittersweet where it was so exciting to see the world evolving so rapidly beyond our control.

I know there has been some tension and protests and stress around even this event, this celebration, which I think is great — it is emblematic of what Second Life is all about and why it is so special. Even to attempt to make kind of cultural or any kind of a celebration that makes a presentation of what Second Life is, is kind of bound to not work in some sense because what we are doing here together is outside the bounds of possibility. There is more going on and there is more meaning and more of the future and more imagination here than I think there have ever been in many ways anywhere on earth. So, in a way that I think is very inspiring, when you try to paint a picture of it at one time and in one place, you fail. You cannot do it and I think that is moving.

So, anyway, you are surrounded by all of this amazing content that has been built from people all over Second Life. Everybody who has not seen it and, of course, I will bet everyone who is standing in front of me has already, should definitely spend time today and wander around and take a look at all of it; I know I am going to do that after I speak here. I think the other thing to note is just obviously how much Second Life has grown. We are in a community now of a quarter of a million people or so a day using Second Life and maybe a million people or more that are really actively using it. The growth continues. It is unbelievable to look back just a couple of years and realize both how big the world seemed a couple of years ago and how small it actually was in terms of how many people there were here. So, I, as always, am just inspired to see that.

In addition to the continued growth, stuff that has happened lately, we have been working hard on trying to make Second Life more stable. I think we have made some progress there in the last couple of quarters. There is a lot more to do, but we are keeping the lights on here as this world continues to grow around us. That continues to be a big focus of our efforts, going forward. Of course, the other big change is that Linden Lab has a new CEO and that is an amazing transition, one that I have talked about, talked about it on the blog and talked about it a little bit in different interviews and different live formats, but an amazing sign of growth for the company is that we have graduated to a stage where we have found a new CEO to lead us on and I am incredibly excited, both to have M, Mark, here with us leading the company and, also, to be able myself to work more on the technology ideas and the direction for new strategy and features and capabilities for Second Life.

I have talked about this before. I am, at heart, a designer and a developer and, for me, it is just incredibly rewarding to just be able to get back to doing that more day-to-day and then have somebody amazing whose heart is aligned with and a part of Second Life and, also, who has the skills and experience to help us grow beyond where we are today, which is pretty big. We are one of the biggest services on the internet right now. As a company, we are about 250 people, so that is huge, I mean it really is — that is a lot of people when you are coordinating and working together on a project as big as Second Life. It is amazing to know, for me, that looking at all of this content out here that I can now focus more on development and thinking and planning and thinking about what the next generation of all of this is going to look like and Mark, M, can help lead us in the company onto bigger and bigger things.

So, having said that, let me ask Mark to come on up onstage here and join me and, like I said in the beginning, I am going to do this funny — I am going to take my microphone off here and hand it to M so that he can talk. We will do that for a little bit and then we will logoff and log back on again and walk around and chat with everybody. It has been great to talk to everybody and I hope it is a great day and here is my comrade, M Linden.

M Linden

Thank you so much, Philip. It is a great pleasure to be here and the view of the stage is absolutely astounding. It is such an amazing array of talent and creativity. This is my first speech inworld to a large group of avatars and, I have to say, it is much more interesting and visually stimulating than any real-world audience could possibly be. Such an outpouring of creativity is what makes Second Life the amazing phenomenon that it is today. I have spent a little time checking out the exhibits and I am going to spend some more during the birthday celebration to see all of the creativity that has been shared by the Residents. It is amazing when you see such individual and community collaboration going into a project like this and it is really what makes Second Life the rich experience that we all enjoy today.

When Philip asked me to join Linden Lab, I was real excited because it is the perfect intersection of creativity, technology, and business and it is so exciting to see what is possible when great minds come together to create something really, really unique. So, it is great to see the Residents, solution providers, organizations, educators all coming together to create something like this.

We are at a really interesting time in our development here at Linden Lab and Second Life because when a company and a technology go through the growth that we have gone through, it creates both growth opportunities and challenges as we are at a really, really interesting inflection point in Second Life's history now. It is the largest user-generated content virtual world we know of — that is an enormous achievement because of all the effort that needs to go into the content creation, but, also, from a technology perspective. It is an enormous and noteworthy achievement and one that is very, very exciting. We have a lot of work to do and we are focused on doing it to make sure the Resident experience becomes the Resident experience that we want it to be, so we are very, very focused on usability and stability so we can continue to bring new Residents into the fold and allow our platform to grow and the economy to thrive.

One of the fundamental elements of that is around IP rights. It is really, really important that people who create great content are able to enjoy it and protect it and that was one of the things that Philip put in place and has underpinned the economy as we know it today. One of the interesting challenges that we face is that, as Second Life becomes much more international and about 60% of our Residents now are outside of the US, we have a whole set of diverse values, beliefs, and even laws that we have to take into consideration. Nevertheless, we believe in individuality, we prize creativity, and we are going to do everything we can to keep Second Life as open and free flowing as it has always been.

The last five years have been phenomenal; I think they have been history-making in many, many ways. The vision that Philip had for the company for Second Life and Linden Lab is very much alive today and has tremendous momentum for the future. It is very, very exciting to see this thing called Second Life take on a global perspective to become a global economy in its own right.

It is, also, very exciting to see how it is changing the way we work. I find it absolutely compelling to do inworld meetings to connect with people in different places and use Second Life as a place to do business. It is, also, phenomenal from an education perspective and in today's world where we are so resource-constrained in the real world with energy and physical space, the thought of educating and being educated in Second Life is really, really exciting. Also, advancements in medical research and technology are being built on the back of Second Life and that is exciting to see. Philanthropy, too, we can see throughout Second Life.

So, there are many, many dimensions to the experience that make this so evocative and so compelling and these are the reasons that we are all very excited about the future of Second Life and the possibilities ahead as we celebrate our 10th year anniversary, 20th, 25th...

Philip, you will probably have to change your hair to silver by our 25th anniversary because it has been awhile since you have updated your avatar; someone wrote that it has been four years at least. I have to say you have the best hair in Second Life, even if it is the oldest hair, it is terrific. We are all looking forward to our 10th, 15th, 20th, and 25th anniversaries. This is an incredibly exciting phenomenon and it is exciting because of all the hard work, enthusiasm, creativity, and innovation that Residents, like the Residents we are looking at right now, have put into it.

So, it is a great pleasure to be here and I am very, very excited about the prospects for Second Life and the future ahead. Thank you very much for coming today and for sharing all of your great work, we are looking forward to enjoying it.