Rough Notes on Philip and BK's Inworld Meeting and Q&A

These are my Rough Notes on Philip and BK's Inworld Meeting and Q&A. I missed some stuff and might have summarized oddly. I will add a full transcript and video when they become available. A common thread in the talk was making things Fast, Easy and Fun.

Notes:

Bob 6 months at LL, first change to meet the community

Philip, why back, and feel.
Why is SL not gone,
VW are going to profoundly change the world

Nothing that philip has seen has changed his belief in vws.

Philip think he can help with growing Sl and vws.

Philip profoundly believe in this thing.


Improving the basic user experience, is about tearing down the walls. It is more apt now then 30 days ago. It is so important that we pull back and fix the basic experience.

Internal plan
250 at LL
What is a single slide, set of statements, and organize our work around it.

To make a statement that is so clear that we can all remember it.


3 words at the top for our strategy
Fast easy fun, these words capture what SL can and should be.

In so many areas we are not living up to Fast easy and fun.

Beneath those 3 words we have 3 big bullets,
Back to basics
Winning back the lead
Very important to grow the virtual content economy


Back to basics:
what it means in the next 2/3 quarters, is a intense focus on crashes and lag.

regarding crashing hardest is the viewer, there is also the server.

We are going to work, to have the 2.1 code base to have fewer crashes then 1.23

We are going to work to drop it well below 1.23

Set a target goal, if the crash rate rises above the goal we are going to work in right away again. we are monitoring this week by week.

Lag
We are going to turn on http texture next week, make loading texture a lot faster.

Focusing on restructuring chat and group chat, to have it not/less depended on the sims. So they won't impact the chat.

regaining the lead
Greatly increase the interaction of new releases. Very short release cycles. Iterating, doing it in small steps, week by week. We are going to change all our systems to allows us to iterate in that way.

And completely opening the code, so the code will always be visible by you while we are developing out product.

The second big area of our focus is the viewer 2.
We clearly have a big challenge there. There are lot of people who are frustrated with and we do apologize.

The things with v2 is that it does have technology features that we don't want to loose. And we are going to work hard on making the viewer better for both builder and explorers.

Help us rapidly develop the viewer, to develop everything we need.

We are going to bring in the open source community in a short loop to help us develop the viewer and regain the tech lead.


The virtual economy, It does not mean SL is only about making Money. Fundamentally SL is a system where we create and experience content. That means the success the content creators is the key driver.

How we measure that is hard.

If we add a new capability like Mesh, the question about that, is that useful to everybody. Not every body will use t

Optimizing the process, find try buy. Is a place where we can and need to make positive change.

Search, we greatly increased the size


One problem is having to go to a sandbox and rez a box to try on a pair of shoes. We are directly going to address that issue.


SL has more amazing content, then a new user can get to.

We are going to switch the new user process. A link in the destination guide should be a first step for a new user.

We are going to change registration and welcome islands in the coming weeks.

Second Life Enterprise:
We don't know exactly who is using SL, it is used by business, education, etc.

Crashes, lag impacts business education too, improvements there will also improve the experience of those uses on the main grid. We are stopping work on the behind the firewall solution.

Q&A:

Economy, is the entire economy.

We do need to create a really great 2D shopping experience. The existence of the web metaphore will have some impact for sure. But like Offline and online shopping can compliment each other. so can here.


Search, gotten a bunch of smart people with domain expertise we are focussing on it day by day, week by week.

Region crossing, and scripted objects. We have a entire scrum team working on this.

Mesh, we are very exited about mesh impact on the economy. We are careful to implement Mesh so it has a huge impact, but so that its impact on lag is either zero or less.

Im profoundly committed to get some kind of make over of my avatar. I am aware that it negatively impacts all the work that you do if my avatar appears like it is in the media. It is my alter ego, so I will be careful about it.

Bob
The other aspect that we need to do.
There are a lot things going on in the day to day, what we focus on, what we deploy.

philip
SL is fundamentally a immersive experience, our focus is going to shift is to completely improve that experience.

So we are going to look into how we can

User growth is critical, because that is part of the feedback loop in finding out if we are doing good work.

We are fundamentally change how communicate about changes. More messages will come in the coming weeks and months.
Bob and I won't talk about any more specific technology because we can't micro manage all the things in development.

Doesn't Fast, easy and Fun miss the sense of meaningfulness, which set SL apart from other products.

We don't want to change the depth of system, we want to make the capabilities fast easy and fun. Add simplicity, speed and elegance.

Are there any plans to make sl a multi platform experience? Like a browser.
Let's start with a browser, fundamentally full 3D in the browser is coming, but not for a few year.
We have a few people looking at it.

We are going to focus on the browser for the next 2 or 3 quarters.


Fast easy and fun, is that directed at any community?
We are not focussing on community. But take teachers as a example, it is very hard for teachers to come in take content from a friend and do a class. These are the basic features, fast easy fun will help them.

Everyone together on the maingrid, business education, if we need to create a feature set to accomplish that we are going to do that.

How does the organization handle complexity

On the open source side, we are going to change the open source direction to focus on specific work on the production viewer. We will increase the impact of the open source viewer.

When we talk about making v2 work for new and existing users. That might means different UIs for the 2. When you are in build mode you are in a completely different mindset then when you are newby learning to put clothes on and explore a amazing castle.

Can Philip confirm if he is back for the long term? My activities are completely focuses on the user experiences, we have not began on selecting a new ceo. I'm here full time and tremendously enjoying the work I'm doing.


Closing comments,
We are going to look at every way we can effectively communicate to help us do our work better. We are going to try different things. You can email us about that. This format is great but is not effective for all uses.