Linden Lab CEO on Second Life's growth, future

Kingdon: Linden Lab's balance sheet is strong and our cash balance continues to grow. We're reinvesting our profits to further enhance the Second Life experience. We currently have 330 employees and are actively recruiting for 70 positions over the next 4-6 months, and we're soon to open a new office in Europe (Amsterdam), which will be our ninth globally.

TIS: A company press release recently made a point of comparing the engagement levels found in Second Life and social networks. Do you see SL as a competitor to social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn

Kingdon: No, we're not in competition with social networks -- just the opposite. We've created official Second Life outposts on several. You can connect with us at Facebook.com/SecondLife or Twitter.com/SecondLife, for example. And, there's a very active community on Flickr and Plurk. Plus we're working to add social tools that enable Second Life to be more tightly connected to the social networks most popular with our users.

While people are connecting, socializing, and sharing with each other in Second Life, the virtual world is in its essence very different from social networking sites. It's a rich and immersive three-dimensional experience, enables synchronous communication, and has its own vibrant virtual goods marketplace where users will conduct more than $500 million worth of user-to-user transactions this year. Because of its immersive nature, Residents spend an average of about 100 minutes inworld each session, and about 40 hours in Second Life each month. To provide some context for this engagement metric, our release invited a comparison of the amount of time spent in Second Life with something many people have experience with -- spending time on a social networking website.

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