PC Advisor Interviews Joe Miller

In an interview with PC Advisor, Joe miller, vice president of Linden Lab, says Linden Lab is working hard on voice capabilities. Joe states in the interview:

Obviously we want voice to be an important part of the Second Life fabric, so that if you walk up to someone who is voice enabled you’ll be able to just start a conversation.

You won’t have to run anything else, or do anything else: just speak to someone or a group of people as you engage in a conversation today in a room. As you move through a large group of people, you’ll be able to hear multiple voices, each emanating from the proper place in 3D where they are, so it makes it very much like a real experience of walking through a crowded room where there’s a number of people speaking. It’s an important attribute we’ll be adding shortly.

Personally. I have a hard time imagining the addition of much more data flow between the servers and the viewers. It is not like we are having any problems with Second Life now due to extreme amounts of data streaming.

I am with Joe on the need for search to be improved significantly. Joe basically states the search needs to be more natural and visual. Hopefully to provide more relevant results.

Speaking on Second Life being an effective platform for real world companies branding, Joe states

People who bring their brand to Second Life are looking for a different kind of return… not using traditional advertising means… The actual proposition of creating a message or value around your brand takes quite a different form when you have a place to exhibit and make it real in the virtual world of Second Life.

I think Joe’s answer on investment in real estate worries in case Second Life ever closes was pretty weak. Joe simply claims Second Life has been around for three and a half years and the company isn’t a startup company, and suggest Second Life style environments are in the beginning stages. This almost seem a contradiction to me.

When PC Adviser asked Joe about some calling Second Life a new operating system; Joe states,

The point is we have created a true platform for all kinds of activities, and that’s what an OS is about.

Unlike a game company, we don’t guide the user on a mission, on a quest or a particular application. We provide a blank slate and our residents create many reasons for our customers to stick around and enjoy the experience.

I found Joe’s finial statement in the interview particularly interesting.

We’re at a critical mass of active, committed users from the standpoint that our residents now create more new content, activities and events than we can keep track of. If we were to go away tomorrow, the platform, the community, the technology would live on. We don’t need to be the catalyst for the community to continue to use the platform in interesting and transformative ways. That continues every day without us having to inject new content, systems or capabilities into the world.

But we’re at the very early stages of this. For some people, it’s not ready for prime time yet. Certainly, it does require a fairly modern computer, a capable graphics card, a broadband connection.

It’s not something that everyone can just put to use. There’s also a fairly steep learning curve in getting into the world but we’re working hard at making it easier… for people to find that context for staying, for finding a driving reason for them to say: ‘Well, this is more than just an interesting experience to sample once. This is something I can come back to and know there’s something here that’s tailored to my interests’.

So we’re getting better at providing people with search capabilities that work. We’re doing some things with tagging events, objects, experiences and places with metadata to give people visualisation tools so they can see on a map where things are happening that might be of interest to them, based on their profile.

We’re doing a number of things to make it easier to engage with the experience.