Second Life has a lot to undo to get back to where it was before Kingdumb messed it up. and i don’t mean any technical advances. that should not be credited to Kingdumb, it’s the passion of the programmers that make any advances. sure, you can give a directive “let’s make it better”, but guess what? you don’t become that level of a coder unless you have serious passion. look at the OpenSim peeps. they don’t get paid anything yet in just a short time (they have worked on OS for a fraction of what LL has) they have managed to get 1000 avatars on what is a a normal sim, they have developed a browser-based world (albeit with Unity 3D, but they have done far more than LL has)

don’t insult the remaining and probably overworked coders at LL by thanking Mark Kingdon for the advances in stability and improvements in performance

the massive, and i mean massive at a third of the workforce, firings brought so much ill will toward Linden Lab that if they want to save it, Philip is the only one that can. not because Philip has the passion for SL, i frankly don’t think he has. his SL7B speech started out by saying “i can’t talk long . . . “. i think they could have scheduled that better, don’t you?

Philip coming back as interim CEO will stop some people from leaving. i’m not sure it will affect new people coming in. in some ways, it seems desperate to have him back and maybe he was bored out of his skull with lovemachine. our post a few days ago with his sad survey speaks to the lack of passion he has going on with lovemachine. if i can blog everyday just for the sake of talking about virtual worlds, you’d thing Philip could blog at least once a week about lovemachine (plus i work a real fulltime job and still blog like mad)

the lovemachine blog reflects a lack of enthusiasm when two of the latest posts were a survey showing “see people like me” and about being able to use a solar mat to run your macbook

Philip is a bright guy, no doubt in my mind about that. and even visionary but does he still have a spark for SL. did the board say “get your face in here and out there in the interwebz or we are going to lose this thing”? why say you are interim right off the bat? you could say that you are stepping in as CEO and leave it at that for a few weeks anyway. no need to say you are coming back but only as a temp CEO . . .

it has do do with perception. you need someone to make you look genuine and inspire that trust we all had a few years ago

i like how Lady Gaga is on the web. she seems very real. she is a talented artist for sure but comes across as being just herself. it’s not all attitude like Madonna used to be. yes, lady gaga (who follows yours truly on twitter btw) is over the top in her performances and, imo, does so because it is fun for her and pokes fun at the pop celebrity craze. i think she is a very self-actualized person who has their own life very together. she does this by being real online and in interviews

that’s what we need to see, imho, from Philip. not this bs crap like “we thank Mark for all his blah, blah, blah”. he doesn’t need thanks, you already paid him and i am sure he has a hefty severance package – in the real world, your pay is usually also your thanks. just speak the truth - “second life did not get to where i was hoping and it was more frustrating than i thought to be so removed from something i really love – i am sorry for what has happened in the last two years”

be real because it won’t take too much more fake crap to turn second life into the butt of a joke

so for a dollar a year, i would step up and be CEO

before Mark Kingdon totally turned me off of second life and made it increasingly harder for my residents to make a living isl, i was a top evangelist for sl. google me and look at everything from before 6 months ago

you need someone that can create a buzz about second life inside the social networks. M Linden was for sh!t on that, not even able to tweet me a hello when i was still full on happy isl and being polite and evangelistic about sl

sl.com has gobs of traffic but your SEO, how well you are connected and represented online, in social networks, and in people’s hearts is not even as good as this dumb blog! how is that even possible?

we rank 13,097 out of 2.5 million websites and sl ranks 18,617. that is just dumb

so what would i do if you were to be Chief Ener Officer?

• fire Wallace Linden. what a dope he is. some conversation manager, i asked him (and M) directly to just tweet a hello and he could not even get that done (for pete’s sake – pete, a fired linden?), log into M’s twitter and say “hai”. can you imagine how i would have spazzed over that (pre january time frame when i still held fast to the belief that sl was the best thing since sliced bread). how is it that he did not get fired? conversation manager? lol, 375 twitter followers? are you freaking kidding me? i do this social stuff just for fun and have 21k followers, imagine if i did this as my real job. it’s not a boast at all, merely saying that if a goofball like me with no financial backing and only spending 30 minutes to an hour a day (that includes making an animation in Qavimator today, launching OpenSim, taking the pic, adjusting it in photoshop, uploading it to flickr, . . . ). it’s not about managing the conversation, it’s about having a conversation, so if you can rattle on and on, you are golden – no real skill needed! <– obviously one of Ener’s buttons  =p
• apologize in general to all residents, and specifically to people like Jokay for the shameful manner that M Linden smacked her. give Jokay an annual grant of say $2000 to give out to the most innovative education use of sl plus 10 sims free for a year to award to top educators. foster a significant niche and hire Pathfinder back as a consultant, if he would even have you, so that you can define a few core niches – education being one that would flourish with a little attention (get attention by doing the right thing with your SEO – it is not hard!!!)
• give Torley whatever he wants to see if his passion will reignite. all i know is that three years ago, his personal blog was only about second life, his enthusiasm was contagious. now it’s only about music. something changed along the way. if it was simply growth, it would be second life PLUS music. reignite passion and you have a veritable army of pr people rolled into one awesome person. i have no idea what happened, probably corporate bs but that’s a huge loss for LL
• drop the price of sims. $295 is too much. people want their own land. or at least feel ike it is theirs. i don’t believe that you have to participate in a “race to the bottom”, but certainly something like $195 a month should be doable? especially with the next point
• move away from servers to something like the Amazon elastic compute cloud service to be more environmental (why should empty sims be running at the same capacity as full sims and why should Linden Lab be paying for 100s of idle servers when a much better and less expensive, proven method is available?) and more scalable. say that the former iliveisl estate wanted to hold a virtual component to a real life conference, say for eLearning, say for something that subQuark was asked to do by the same Texas conference that had Pathfinder deliver a keynote at. he should be able to say “i would be delighted to host a space for several hundred virtual attendees” and to scale up for a few days. with Amazon EC2, you could allow him to scale up for a week, add 4 sims, and do it all for just $200 and you’d still make money! automated setup would allow you to offer this for the cost of a few dollars to LL. i know because i RDP to our server in Reaction Grid and if i can add a region, name it, and position it, then certainly you could build a back end that would bill the user for live load time
• truly become part of the virtual world community. it’s not just second life anymore, but you could be the leader of it by contributing to the OpenSim community. both in money (trust me, the good will you could generate for very little money would be tremendous). sponsor OpenSim projects knowing that whether you do or not, they will still continue to make improvements. Kyle at Reaction grid has offered to work with Mark Kingdon but got the same answer i did, nothing. don’t be so smart as to exclude your competition. it’s like Philip wrote in a lovemachine blog post: “Competition for scarce resources (or customers) is often assumed by early-stage ecosystem players to exist when it actually does not. [...] The people doing the same crazy stuff as you – those should be your allies.  The fact that they exist means you might just be right.”
• sponsor and partner with projects led by visionaries. Chris Moore, CIO for the City of Edmonton is building in Second Life. give him 25 sims free for a year, help him attract a volunteer army of sl mentors to help city residents learn about sl and how to express their creativity in it. run contests on that sort of thing to get user-generated content like videos that will add immensely to your SEO and help Second Life become a household name

well my hour of social hobbying is up and these are just my ramblings. i still love second life, even though i have not logged into it in the last few months. it gave me a fantastic skill set. i would love to do joint projects and connect our Reaction Grid Enclave Harbour with a foothold in second life. a proverbial win-win, but hey – what the eff do i know? i spent $3k a month in that dumb virtual world . . .

*heads back into Reaction Grid where the “management team” is made of real people that understand that customers are real people – good luck Chris (a real person) with the installation of the latest version of OpenSim, i am nervous for you and appreciate all the sweating you are doing to make sure we have a wonderful experience – thank you*