Ebbe Altberg – “We Will Continue To Invest In SL And Keep Improving And Have No Plans For Any Shutdown. “

Ebbe Altberg (AKA Ebbe Linden) has been engaging with the Second Life community on the official forums. In a forum post Ebbe reiterated that Second Life isn’t closing down, despite the announcement of plans for a new Linden Lab virtual world.

I’m still somewhat at a loss to understand why people seem to be ignoring the fact that Second Life isn’t closing down, but people seem convinced that the new virtual world is a replacement for Second Life, rather than just another virtual world from Linden Lab.

In the forum post, Ebbe stated :

I pretty much only said these things:

We are embarking on a huge project to build a better virtual world from the ground up.

We are not going to constrain how good it can be by forcing some levels of backwards compatability (Sine then I’ve added some detail that identity and social connections and Lindens$ will come across and quite a bit of content as well, but with content we need more time to figure out exactly what will be backwards compatible, people will have plenty of time to see how this plays out and get a chance to try the new while still also hanging out in SL)

We will continue to invest in SL and keep improving and have no plans for any shutdown.

The rest is all speculation that has since then popped up.

That really is pretty much all Linden Lab have said, yet people seem to be reading between lines that don’t exist. Here’s the thing, even if Linden Lab wanted to force migrate people to their new world, a lot of people wouldn’t go because their virtual world love is Second Life, if Second Life closed down some people would give up on virtual worlds, others would move somewhere away from Linden Lab properties and some of course would go to Linden Lab’s new world, but it would be extremely foolish of Linden Lab to close Second Life in the next few years and to be fair to Linden Lab, there are absolutely no signs whatsoever that they intend to close Second Life.

One area where I don’t think Linden Lab have helped themselves here is in announcing that the new world will not initially be backwards compatible with all of the existing Second Life content. That was a mistake, they should not have mentioned Second Life in that sort of context when talking of their new world. The only real mention of Second Life should have been with regards to stating that Second Life isn’t being shutdown and that development would continue.

I praised Rod Humble when he was CEO for bringing new products to the Linden Lab table, not all of them worked but it’s important for the future of Linden Lab for them to have more products than Second Life in their portfolio.

The lack of products from Linden Lab probably explains some of the angst around too. Linden Lab is primarily known for Second Life, had Linden Lab a few other virtual worlds already, then I believe people would be more excited about future developments, rather than being suspicious of where this is all heading. Hopefully in the future Linden Lab will have plenty of other products. Many companies we engage with daily have multiple products and we don’t see the announcement of a new product as being the death knell of an existing product in a lot of cases.

The new virtual world is another product, it’s not Second Life and really Linden Lab should promote the new virtual world as precisely that, a new virtual world. Like any new virtual world it will be trying to knock Second Life off its perch and that’s a hefty aim, but Linden Lab have some very ambitious hopes for their new virtual world.

I don’t believe that Second Life will prove to be immortal, but it’s not going to disappear anytime soon unless Linden Lab have a moment of madness. People have too much invested in their communities, creations, purchases and activities. I’ve said repeatedly that power in the community is an important ingredient, Second Life has it and that’s why it will continue to prosper, the new virtual world will need to start from the ground up in terms of attracting communities and that will take time.

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