Mad Labs

"Blood for the Blood God! Marrow for the Mighty M! Tremble before the spectacle of the Linden who is impossible to name, for to even contemplate his actual epithet with a consciousness and body confined to a mere three dimensions is not possible for meager mortals such as yourselves: to even attempt it is forbidden, lest ye wake things best not disturbed."

- Linden Lab New Employee Orientation Packet

The most disturbing image from the recent vice presidential debate was somebody waving a sign that read, "Dick Cheney in a Dress" -- and this from a supporter of Sarah Palin, mind you. As if that was on any level humanly conceivable a good thing.

While you're meekly pondering the many layers of shivering terror that such a meme conveys, let me sneak in an apology for the lack of blog updates: Between these electoral shenanigans, a stock market collapse, and a new collar around my neck, I haven't had time.

So to keep you entertained, I've reached out to some previous contributors for some fresh articles. First to answer the call was long-time Tiny Dancing contributor, M Linden. Four moons ago, M Linden was a mild-mannered peddler of Internet fruits and vegetables on the aptly-named Organic.com. Then he wrested control of Linden Lab and its wayward band of hippies, neckbeards, and *nix aficionados from a callipygous boy-toy named Phillip Linden.

In this thoughtful retrospective, he reminisces about his first eventful months as the CEO of Linden Lab.

His article has been sitting in my inbox for a while, for which I apologize, and it's possible you may have already seen a later version he posted on the official Second Life blog.

But I still think this early draft shares some surprising insights about the new direction. Enjoy!

~ Kanomi


State of the Lab
by M Linden

My how time flies when you are having fun. In my first four months as your Chief Enablement Officer, our shared social interactive space has been evolving into the new 2.0 ecosystem at netspeed.

During that time, we at the Lab have been busy spearheading new initiatives and breadcrumbing task forces to facilitate positive uptick in your enjoyment matrix.

Here's our progress report.


How are we doing?

We're really getting outside the box on some of our incremental, value add solutions. We just finished up a very proactive third quarter. Yesterday, we hit a peak concurrency of 71,232 ponygirls -- that's an increase of 6% in less than a month. Year-over-year, peak ponygirls concurrency has grown more than 38%.

An even more impressive figure is the number of Gorean Masters who actually logged in and engaged in community-based interactions with their slaves on a peer-to-peer basis this month. Did I say slaves? I'm sorry, I meant differentially-liberated life partner (DLLP).

The big win on this customer flow is that more than 5,942 unique Gorean Masters and their DLLPs logged in and communally leveraged their Excite attachments at some point during the week. That's a big win-win on the consumer satisfaction matrix.

Now you may be querying your knowledge base as to why we're data mining a statistic as granular as that, but it's a product requirement for our segmentation 2.0 campaign. Some major sponsorship partners are already drilling down to core gamer demographic, and we believe the next generation of that wave is to further slice and dice that metric into even more narrowband demos like catgirls and scalies.

Because when I was summoned here, it was to execute this vision. I have that vision. When a PepsiCola says, "We're scaling up a new energy vitalization drink narrow-beamed at online bondage gimps. Where can we bandwidth Power Piss at our key demo?" it's going to be Linden Lab that stands up and says, "Salutations sponsorship prospect! Check out these sims!"


Office Hours

I was power-idling from 1:30 SLT to 1:45 SLT yesterday, October 2nd, inside that big Greek temple conference room, touching base with all of you userbase partners on a micro level. My client timed out, but I had my chat log on, and my executive assistant bullet pointed your grievances on a macro level. I see some black eyes on connectivity still. We're working together for some same page wins on that one.

Remember, you don't need to proactively make an appointment for Office Hours, just touch down for the meet and greet and we'll workshop and do some concepting. You can find my office by engaging my Inventory button, then interacting with my Landmarks folder. If you miss it next time I'll send out a PowerPoint.


Electronic Arts' Spore

I wanted to get our ducks in a row on this one as a competitor threat because I was getting good twitter from some peer group competitors on LinkedIn. So I mandated a threat assessment report from our boots on the ground team of customer satisfaction enablers. Then I interfaced with the e-tainment game client itself. It was sporing. Ha ha!

Take a memo, EA! You may have engaged more potential eyeballs than us right now but they aren't clustering on your site. Our users are 95% stickier than yours -- and if you don't believe me, just check out our Bukkake sims around 2 AM, Berlin time.


What's Next?

With more core competencies and a new client satisfaction matrix, we're going to ramp up our monetization processes.

And if that doesn't uptick some positive outcomes, I'll ask Hank Paulson for a bailout. After all, we have a lot of failed banks in Second Life too.


>:|