I like Ebbe Altberg, he talks to the community, he’s not afraid to tell people they are angry :
Wow, you are an angry person. Ok, so, why are you so angry?
He talks to the press and has recently been talking to Re/Code in an article entitled : Second Life Creator Linden Lab Says Virtual Worlds and Virtual Reality Belong Together. Early on in that article we see that Ebbe has learnt how to talk the talk :
“We don’t call it a game,” says Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg, almost before our interview has begun.
He’s talking about Linden’s most famous product, Second Life, now 11 years old. That’s old by game — sorry, “virtual world” — standards, but its “significant revenue” means the 185-person company is profitable, Altberg said. Coming to Linden from BranchOut after the departure of CEO Rod Humble in January, Altberg does not mince words about Second Life’s past mistakes.
That article also talks about Oclus Rift usage in Second Life, including a shout out to Jo Yardley of 1920’s Berlin without mentioning her name :
“One creator went into her virtual world in Oculus for the first time and was crying,” Altberg said. “It’s very powerful stuff.”
Philip Rosedale also features in the article with talk of High Fidelity but I’m going off on a tangent here, the point is Ebbe engages and it’s very encouraging. However one of the problems with engaging is that everything you say is dissected, analysed and at times misunderstood. Then there’s the fact that what you say is remembered, especially on the internet. So it was with some surprise that I witnessed Ebbe getting involved in a Twitter exchange about group chat. Not only did Ebbe get involved, he actually suggested that group chat will be fixed before the new world launches, an extremely bold claim indeed.
Continue reading “Ebbe Altberg Throws Down The Gauntlet Regarding Fixing Second Life Group Chat”