Linden Lab founder and CEO give a glimpse of Second life’s future

Daniel Voyager has tweeted the keynotes from M and Philip Linden at SLCC 2009. You can view M Linden’s 104 presentation slides here.

Key tweets from Daniel that interested me in particular were:

1. Philip Linden

There will be lots of change. The prairie where we are now can become New York City

Hmm, interesting perspective. Some people actually like living on the prairies – this has the smell of progress at expense of lifestyle all around it. I do see the point but it’s an unfortunate metaphor.

Things are changing extremely rapidly and the impact will be revolutionary not evolutionary

Extremely common corporate speak that pretty much says the same thing as the first point.

Try and understand we’re at the very beginning, we’re going to have to weather tremendous change

See points one and two above – I’m waiting for the ‘duck and cover’ lecture.

We are at the very beginning. We’ll not like all the changes. It is inevitable. Try to work with us, let go a bit

I get the picture Philip, I really do. How about some vision behind the revolution warning system? To be fair, I’m sure he said a lot more than what Daniel was able to Tweet, but there’s still a lot of ‘worlds in crisis’ talk.

To scale large, we need: More decentraliztion of services. But we have “right napkin drawings”

I’m giving the benefit of the doubt on this one, assuming he means the bright, radically changed future in store. If he meant that the ongoing organic growth of Second Life is still reliant on good ‘napkin drawings’, then I hope some people at SLCC in person threw things.

2. M Linden

We’re coming out of the trough of disillusionment. In the middle of a top to bottom renovation

The Trough of Disillusionment – that has to be a movie or album title if it isn’t already. Snap it up while you can! Or was it the title of the focus group report after the introduction of Jar Jar Binks into the Star Wars franchise?

We’re at SL 1.0 heading to 2.0. We probaly need to get to 10.0 for billion users

Hard to argue with this. That said, I think the game will have changed so irretrievably in the next few years that the idea of Second Life having a billion users may be just a little fanciful in what’s likely to be one big field of competitors,

SL will bring more of the web into second life and more of second life into the web

Absolutely – it’ll be how embeddable Second Life is that really determines its ongoing success.

Overall, there’s not a lot surprising in the details: you’d expect a CEO and Board member to cite the need for ongoing good growth, a commitment to innovation and an upbeat assessment on the future. With the cynicism meter lowered a little, it’s fair to say M Linden has overseen some improvements in the usability and stability of Second Life. Add to that the ongoing good growth in the number of residents and the overall economy and it seems the revolution may happen. Whether it’s a bloodless one is yet to be seen.