SECOND LIFE PASSES 2 BILLION HOURS

Linden CEO Phillip Rosedale announced recently that Second Life passed 2 Billion hours in views.

Hamlet Au's New World Notes put those hours into prespective!

• 2 billion total user hours translate to 228,310 total years of Second Life usage.
• About 20 million people have tried Second Life so far. So 2 billion user hours averages out to 100 hours per user -- i.e. 5 days in Second Life.
• SL surpassed 1 billion user hours in September 2009, which took six years from its Summer 2003 launch to reach, so it took only 3 years to add one billion more

I know they got a billion out of me!

All of Hamlet's story after the break.

Philip Rosedale: Second Life Usage Surpasses 2 Billion Hours

By Hamlet Au

After I Tweeted that Second Life was still in Nielsen's Top 10, SL co-founder Philip Rosedale responded with a Tweet of his own: "SL recently passed 2+ Billion hours of use!" Maybe I missed if this milestone was mentioned before, but in any case, it's worth noting here. SL surpassed 1 billion user hours in September 2009, which took six years from its Summer 2003 launch to reach, so it took only 3 years to add one billion more.

From a certain perspective, "2 billion" is such a large number it sort of seems meaningless, so here's some elementary math to put it in perspective:

• 2 billion total user hours translate to 228,310 total years of Second Life usage.
• About 20 million people have tried Second Life so far. So 2 billion user hours averages out to 100 hours per user -- i.e. 5 days in Second Life.
• If you laid those 2 billion hours end to end, they would stretch so far into the cosmos that the ghost of Carl Sagan would appear in front of you and say, "Motherfucker that analogy makes no goddamn sense." And he would be right.

So, 2 billion hours. Monthly active users, to be sure, remain fixed below a million uniques, and probably stand at around 400,000 to 600,000 regular recurring users. But as the hours suggest, those actives are active indeed.

Read more »

SECOND LIFE NEWS: Head Financial Officer Leaves Linden Labs

According to Wagner James "Hamlet" Au's blog, NEW WORLD NOTES, the head financial guy Bob "BK Linden"Komin is leaving Linden Labs.

To find out what it means to Second Life, read after the break.

What Bob "BK Linden" Komin's Departure as CFO Likely Means for Linden Lab & Second Life

by Hamlet Au 

Finally confirming what sources told me back in June, Bob "BK Linden" Komin has officially left his position as Linden Lab's Chief Financial Officer. The company site no longer lists him, and spokesman Peter Gray just said as much to me directly, saying, "Bob Komin has moved on to pursue a new opportunity". However, Gray added, "we plan to hire a new CFO".

Komin's tenure as CFO provokes a lot of mixed reactions among insiders -- everyone credits him for getting Linden Lab back to a stable base of high profit, even if that meant laying off a third of the staff in the wake of former CEO Mark Kingdon, who greatly increased spending before his exit in 2010. Komin's also generally credited (or blamed) for instituting a more traditional corporate management hierarchy on Linden Lab staff, which from one point of view, gave staffers more focus, and from another point of view, finally diminished the democratic, "Tao of Linden" spirit Philip Rosedale instituted during his time as CEO.

So what's this mean for Linden Lab and Second Life? From what I glean and interpret, this: Bob Komin has helped prepare Linden Lab for a post-Second Life era, in which SL is less and less central to the company's strategy and plans. Here's how:

Through the 2010 layoffs and other subsequent departures/firings, he's trimmed down the number of Linden Lab staff directly working on Second Life. At the same time, with the entrance of CEO Rod Humble, he's helped direct the profit from Second Life to several non-SL products, including the projects Patterns, the Minecraft-like game which I wrote about here, and Dio,the text adventure game platform I wrote about here. At this point, Linden Lab has a very large cash reserve to finance and launch these projects and others we're likely soon to hear about. Second Life development will continue, of course, but less and less will be spent on it. Notably, during his tenure Bob Komin did not introduce a new revenue model to Second Life, certainly nothing that will replace the continued loss of private sims, the company's main revenue source. But Linden Lab will still be drawing a profit from these sims for the next 1-3 years, more than enough to subsidize still more non-SL projects.

At this point, in any case, much of Linden Lab's management, many of whom have a game development background, likely see Second Life as a legacy MMO which has run its course. (After all, Electronic Arts, where Rod Humble was once executive, still has Ultima Online among its properties, and that's been around since the mid-90s.) With the launch of new SL development tools, followed by a steady withdrawal of company resources, the future of Second Life will soon be almost completely in the hands of its users.

Read more »