The Alphaville Herald

Auntie M Linden Looks Back Into the Future

by Alphaville Herald on 30/12/08 at 2:55 pm

by Auntie M Linden, noobie metaverse CEO

Greetings all!

Auntie M Linden here.  I’d like to wish you, your Gorean ‘families’, online mafia friends, alts, ex-partners, furries, and reformed griefers a happy and healthy New Year.

As we come to the end of the year, I thought I’d share some of the wonders of Second Life I’ve encountered over the past seven months while being M Linden's secret alt, and talk about what’s ahead in the dog years to come.

This has been an incredible period of discovery for me. I’ve discovered that Second Life residents are not crazy about 66% OpenSpace sim land price increases, for instance. Who would have thought that? Second Life is a wondrous place, filled with amazing avatars, beautiful places and unbelievable things – like creative uses for bots, business opportunities for landowners, recreation for military leaders, and even a special shopping mall.  W-HAT will they think of next?

I can’t do them all justice in a blog post, but I’d like to share some of the experiences and content that make Second Life unlike any other platform for drama, creativity in intellectual property theft, drama, bots, drama, camp chair discussions, drama, innovation in animated sex beds and commerce.  After the jump, I’ve listed some of the many things I’ve enjoyed, been inspired by and admired in and around Second Life since I joined Linden Lab in May.   I’d love for you to post your top picks in the comments for all to enjoy, too. Whoops! I almost forgot – we don’t want you to comment here, non-residents might get the wrong idea. BTW, I spoke with Philip, and yes Prokofy, you are still banned from the forums.

Moving ahead into 2009, we at Linden Lab are continuing to pursue our virtual world-changing mission.  We are working hard to create a virtual world that "…advances the capabilities of the many people that use it, and by doing so affects and transforms them in a positive way, where such a transformation is possible in the virtual world, but only to the extent that such a transformation is voluntary and impacts the bottom line in a significant and positive manner without threatening any of the current staff’s private projects while at the same time erecting sustainable barriers to competition, yet encompassing the human potential inherent in all humans, bots, furries, and gorean slave masters who at the end of the day form the basis of our continued success – our customers."

To make real progress, we’re continuing to focus on a small set of strategic initiatives:

* Ensuring the revenue stream is stable and able to scale with the growth ahead – we’ll probably have to raise prices even more for those of you willing to pay just keep the lights on here, to say nothing of the expensive set of my cronies we have hired recently.

* Improving the first-hour experience (on the web, in the viewer and inworld) for all Residents and especially for new bot users so that we can continue to expand our active user base. Have you noticed how the bots never complain? If we can just convince the land owners to continue to stock up on population enhancing bots, we will totally own the WoW guys soon.

* Making the mainland experience more attractive and fulfilling for Residents because we just realized that those open source creeps and private grids are going to kill the private island business.  Who’s idea was it to help them anyway? Somebody get hold of Cory at EMI and ask him what the second half of the plan was supposed to be – Philip says he can’t remember anymore.

* Localizing our content and experience in key international markets by setting up safe houses for our staff in case we don’t move fast enough to sanitize the online experience to suit each culture.

* Developing new products that offer Residents more opportunities to create, connect, socialize and transact – Philip tells me that the official yiff-like-a-Linden sexbed is sure to take the market by storm and we are committed to competing with the Resident-created content and communities wherever possible – the Nautilus sims are just the beginning!

While the majority of our resources are focused on our core market (fetish-oriented sex content creators and consumers), we are also focused on re-building the business and education markets that has seen some difficulties due to our tarnished brand and the recent land price increase combined with a real world recession in our core markets.  Second Life is a powerful platform for doing ponygirl business, collaborating, teaching and learning and we want to ensure we remain a vital platform for replicating the most boring aspects of both business meetings and real world classrooms for both businesses and educators worldwide – clearly they will want to get their content entangled in our platform where we have rights to do with it as we please. If you think Legend City Online is a problem, you have no idea what we are capable of – but you will find out soon enough.

I feel very fortunate to have joined Linden Lab at this stage of the company’s development. It is immensely gratifying to be part of this amazing thing called Second Life.  You — the Second Life Residents — bring unbounded creativity, passion and commitment to the virtual world.  You — with the content you create and the experiences you craft — make it an amazing world.

Thank you and Happy Holidays!

A few of my favorite things….

* Winterfaire and the annual snowball fight between Lindens and Residents where the PN Greifers took absolute pleasure raining blackface santa cubes on everyone during the sim crashing contest. You still have until 1/5/09 to see all the great builds and events Residents have put together to celebrate winter.

*  the paid SL infomercials run at New World Notes every day and especially James Wager Au and Iris Ophelia’s Hottest Male Avatar of 2008 Contest

* the free SL infomercials at Dusan Writer’s thoughful blog and, in particular, his User Interface contest

* the watermelon infomercials by Torley Linden and his wife Ravenelle's megaprim spite fence in Bear sim. This is absolutely how to treat the paying customers in true Linden style – and shows all that makes Second Life great – http://foo.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2008/11/the-megaprim-sp.html