Drax put his latest episode of the World Makers out today. This is a fun interview with Rod Humble. It runs 5 minutes and there are some interesting bits of information.
If you have listened to Rod’s 2011 speech at UC Santa Cruz’s meeting Inventing the Future of Games, you may not be able to pick up on some of the context included in the video. See Rod Humble Speech Released for a brief summary and links to that video.
Drax asks some questions that bring out what may be surprising answers to some. For those of us that have started researching and following Rod they probably seem more in context.
Rod doesn’t mind that tech types and the tech press is not covering Second Life™. He is very enthusiastic and happy that creative types are coming into SL and creating amazing things.
At 0:45 the video is showing a Rod-Alt in Mayfair, an all mesh build region. Mon Tissu (sp? I’m being lazy – it’s been a tough Monday) is there. Rod is saying there are 1 million active users each month and 400k sign up each month.
Around 1:30 Rod is saying he does not know why SL is magic, but he knows it is.
After that Rod says a few words about privacy. He sees it as important. So, our anonymous avatars are likely to survive for some time. That has good sides and bad sides.
At 2:40 Rod is talking about the performance upgrades being made to SL. If you have listened to Rod’s 2011 SLCC speech, which was shortly after becoming CEO, you’ll make some connections. See: Second Life Rod Humble 2011 Keynote. Rod says that many of the performance improvements will be rolling out this and next quarter. Of course Sever Side Appearance is one of those improvements.
I suspect many of the haters, whiners, and wackadoodles we hear from expected all the things Rod spoke of at SLCC 2011 to happen in the coming year. Following the changes to SL as I do it looks to me like lots of the changes he wanted to make required the foundation code that SL is built on be changed. Now the changes he wanted to make are just nearing completion 2 years later.
At 3:05 Rod starts talking about the Oculus Rift. He says they are working to make the user interface AAA. We’ll see if they pull that off. But, in general the changes Rod wanted for the viewer interface that have made it in, are improvements, unless you still think the V1 user interface is good.
At 4:30 Rod answers Drax question about how Rod relates to the SL community and users.
It is a good video. Well done Drax.
UPDATE: Get more of the Rod Humble interview on Jo Yardley blog: The Rod Humble Interview.
Over now 6 and a half years, I have not been a fan of all decisions that LL took, by far, but with only a few (relatively minor) exceptions, I can tell that since Rod has been running LL, things in SL are doing better on the technical side. Server-side performances have *massively* improved (just remember all the missing textures, hyper-slow and failing TPs, slow attachments rezzing and all the problems we had in SL only a couple years ago, and compare with what we have today…).
The non-technical side (attractiveness, services pricing, customer services, communication, etc), on the other hand, have not improved *at all* and even degraded to the point that SL’s user base is now on a slow decreasing sloop (granted, this trend started and was even worst before Rod arrived).
There’s still a lot of room for improvements, but in my view, there is more room and a real urgency on the non-technical side of things…