Linden Lab Gets A Makeover
The Beanstalk is one of SL’s historic destinations.
By Bill Kaye
Linden Lab isn’t giving up Second Life altogether, it just wants to focus on other things too.
In a recent interview with Venture Beat, the CEO of LL, Rod Humble, talked about a future for the company known for SL, while mentioning little of the virtual world.
In fact, some his sparing comments on SL inspired much negative feedback in the blogosphere, but such is the territory for a Linden. Much of Humble’s interview seemed targeted at rebranding Linden Research as the creator of “shared creative spaces.”
Hamlet Au of New World Notes, the prominent SL blogger and author of The Making of Second Life, picked up on this transition soon after Linden Lab tweaked the HTML on their web-site and responded favorably.
Overall, I think this is a very positive direction for Linden Lab, which has previously been stymied by a vision that it should be building the metaverse, something it was never really founded to be. At the same time, the new Linden Lab branding retains the core aspect of SL that is its most essential, and the most appealing — shared creativity.
Following the new web design and motto, LL unveiled Patterns and Creatorverse. Patterns has drawn comparisons to Minecraft. Patterns, the 3-D virtual building game, forces you to test your engineering skills by building physically feasible structures. Creatorverse allows its users to draw images that are later able to animate.
In the interview with Venture Beat, Humble foreshadowed the release of Dio, an online app and another unnamed app. The common thread, as mentioned in Venture Beat, is tapping new platforms like cell phones and iPads.
Humble did mention, in the Venture Beat article, that SL would get “a major upgrade” but offered no other specifics.
Some commenters seized on Humble’s words as a slight to the SL community. This includes his suggestion that SL users “have enjoyed” the virtual world, as if they no longer do. And some took the context of the story to insinuate a shift away from SL as its priority.
In her extremely insightful blog, Modem World, Inara Pey suggests caution, stressing the quote from Humble: “We are still investing in 3D virtual worlds.”
In fact, Humble went on to comment on Pey’s blog directly, stressing that “Second Life remains key and central to our company.”
Thanks to Pey’s follow-up, Humble also leaves us with this quote, which clearly caught the eye of SL Business Review.
“[W]e absolutely are investing in the large virtual world space which I think will make Second Life users, business owners and developers very happy,” wrote humble on Modem World, “….but it’s a ways off.”
Until SLBR can gather more specifics, let’s start a wish list here.
inKLine Media 